


Harder, Better, Faster, Taller

by PatchworkPoltergeist



Series: Taller [1]
Category: Invader Zim
Genre: (Zim's coming I promise), (mostly) Canon Compliant, And they were teammates..., Elite training days, Gen, Irken Class Politics, Irken relationships are complicated, Tagged For Violence Just In Case, height privilege, local spacebug confused and infuriated by this concept of friendship, longfic, rivals to friends to QPR
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-19
Updated: 2020-07-08
Packaged: 2021-03-01 22:34:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 24,993
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23724670
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PatchworkPoltergeist/pseuds/PatchworkPoltergeist
Summary: Thus far, Elite Red's life had been a work in progress: constant improvement, higher performance, higher rank, and higher stature. The best of the very best. With the start of Invasion Season and Devastis training a new crop of Invaders, Red's plan was clear: Become an Invader. Attain glory. Get snacks. Go solo and never put up with other Irkens' garbage ever again.It was a good plan. A foolproof plan. And then Purple ruined it. (Except for the snacks.)
Relationships: Almighty Tallest Purple & Almighty Tallest Red, Almighty Tallest Purple/Almighty Tallest Red
Series: Taller [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1710085
Comments: 16
Kudos: 150





	1. Elegy For A Microwave

**[Sump, Cycle 17, Era 24]**

Before they learned the art of conquest, before they broke Irk’s atmosphere, before even the first recorded Almighty Tallest, in an era before Eras, the Irken race used to shed their skins. Instead of dragging it around for the rest of their lives, when Irkens grew too large and too great for the smaller creatures they used to be, the obsolete skin fell away.

Discarded. Gone. Welcome to Irken 2.0.

Understand, it was nothing like how other inferior species shed themselves. It didn’t happen piece by piece in little scraps and strips of old flesh. It did not need to be peeled or scraped or scratched off. (Even in their pre-industrial state, let no one call the Irkens messy.) No, Irken skins fell away in one solid piece. More shell than skin, really.

Red saw one once, in the Education Plug. It really had looked exactly like an Irken except transparent, colorless, and hollow on the inside. A physical ghost. While Red had never been one for history—why look backwards when you’re moving forward?—he’d always liked the idea of that. 

Aside from snack baskets and a day off to recover from the soreness, Irkens didn’t really have anything to commemorate height. New encodings came with new ranks, but it wasn’t the same. Evidence of physical growth through PAK data, stats, scores, and trophies were cool and all, but it’d be way cooler to have something solid to hold on to. Something to touch and show off and say, “Check it out, this used to be me”.

That’s what Red would do if he could shed his skin: keep it and marvel at the short little thing he used to be. 

And then he’d stomp it under his boot over and over and he wouldn’t stop until nothing remained but a pile of dust. Yeah. That sounded pretty good.

But the Irken race didn’t do that sort of thing anymore. Now their skins stretched and warped and evolved with them. So Red settled for dumping his outgrown uniforms on the roof, setting them on fire, and chucking the ashes over whoever came walking by. It lacked the visceral satisfaction of stomping old shells to dust, but still gave him that warm furnacey feeling.

Someone in the fleet (Skutch, maybe?) had pointed out that soldiers were supposed to turn their old stuff in. Something about it being protocol to recycle stuff for new recruits or whatever. In twenty years of growth spurts and roof fires, nobody’d ever so much as given Red a warning, though, so Skutch was probably just sniffing around for junk to complain about. He was like that. Most Irkens were like that. They couldn’t handle their own garbage so they rooted through everyone else’s. As if it could make up for their own lousy height or rank or ugly face or low scores or whatever else dragged them down. Pathetic.

That said, Red wished that he hadn’t been so quick to torch that last pair of boots. They’d still be a half-size too small, but better too small than what he had now. 

He frowned at the jagged acid burns that scarred his left boot from calf to toe-tip. In some places, it had eaten all the way through the leather and metal plating. If Red waggled his toes, he could actually see the fabric of his socks through the holes.

Bad look for any soldier reporting for fleet duty. Terrible look for a sub-commander reporting to an official summons. Red glanced at his gauntlet’s screen and the short statement written in official martial green:

**_IRKEN ELITE RED PAK#e82d10:_ **

**_Report to PLANET DEVASTIS no later than the date designated below._ ** **_  
_** **_Disregard ongoing missions as null and void._ ** _  
_

A _personal_ summons. They’d used his name and number and everything. As far as Red knew, he’d been the only pilot in the fleet to get one, meaning he’d done something awesome… or something extremely not-awesome. Demotion and re-encoding levels of not-awesome. Someone would’ve said something (or snickered behind his back) if it was the latter, but with this backwater rock’s shoddy communications, who knew.

Either way, arriving with a ruined boot without a phenomenal excuse for it made for a rotten first impression. Unless someone nearby doubled their shoe size in the next five minutes, Red was out of luck. Showing up early wouldn’t make up for it but it’d take the edge off. Maybe. Plus, he might squeeze in time for boot shopping.

A shot squealed in the distance, and a scattered series of shots followed it. Pink and red pulses lit the firing range on the far side of the tarmac. Right on time. 

Red peered out of the corridor. No sign of the Vortians either, save for the trio of mechanics asleep on a trolley cart. Not that they’d care enough to gossip, but those nerds had a bad habit of getting in the way. He triple-checked the perimeter and slipped into the dull black morning, armed with a fresh cherry slooshie and the beginnings of a plan. 

Shadowed beneath the rows of Voot Runners and Shuuvers, Red strode quickly through the hangar until he found her: a state-of-the-art midsize Spittle Runner, fitted with the latest and greatest mods and comfy customizations, including a self-adjusting cupholder.

So far so good. Made it all the way to his ship and nobody’d noticed him. He felt sure of it.

The silhouette of an Irken soldier slipped out from under a nearby Voot and turned towards him.

…Then again, he’d also felt sure that Vortian transmission fluid didn’t explode in Sump’s pressurized atmosphere either. 

Red felt the wind through the holes in his boot and held back a sigh. Oh well. Better one than one hundred.

Elite Tenn wiped her oily gloves near the base of the ship, and as he approached, Red couldn’t help but notice how lovely she appeared under the hangar lights. The Spittle Runner, of course, not Tenn.

A soldier with an unsophisticated eye may not have noticed her in the crowd at all—just a slightly larger Spit in a fleet of thousands. Regulation size, regulation form. They wouldn’t appreciate the sharp deadly curve of her fins. They couldn’t understand the pulsing snarl of her engines, hungry to score a new kill. They’d never know the might of her cannons, nor the eager high-pitched squeal of her lasers before they blasted a ship to shrapnel. (And if they did, they didn’t live to remember it.) Her imperial blue paint job matched The Almighty Tallest’s robes, and even under Sump’s putrid asphalt sky, she gleamed brighter than a blade. The day she leveled Conventia’s capitol city, Red had named her _The Lenient_. She had no parallel. None but Miyuki’s own _Indomitable_ came within a breadth of her beauty. She was the greatest vehicle to grace this backwater solar system, and if Tenn did not back away from those fins in the next five seconds, Red was gonna make her eat her own antennae.

“What’re you doing all the way out here this early, sir? Shouldn’t you be on the range or the snack bars right now?” Tenn glanced at Red’s expression and took a step away from _The Lenient_.

Red frowned. “More.”

Six steps back.

“Better.”

The tips of Tenn’s fingers fidgeted with her extendable wrench, a delicate little instrument perfect for fine-tuning motherboards and cracking skulls. She watched Red’s approach without breaking eye contact, though she had to tilt her head back to do it. Judging by that sour little squint of hers, she still hadn’t adjusted to the new view.

Seven years ago, Tenn’s five feet and nine inches had meant something. In fact, it’d made her the tallest in the fleet, barring the commanders. But then for whatever reason—laziness, insubordination, too hesitant, too bold, too soft, or just plain unsuitable for higher places—she’d peaked and hadn’t gained so much as a centimeter since. Kind of a shame to see talent stagnate that way, but if Tenn wanted to stay a shrimp, that wasn’t Red’s problem.

Red watched his shadow skim across her face as he passed. He’d expected the novelty of being able to look down on her to eventually wear off. It hadn’t. “ _I’m_ out here minding my own business. What about you?”

No answer, though Red still felt Tenn’s eyes on him. Thinking. She leaned on the hull of her own hunk-of-junk standard Spit. “You got the Devastis call.”

So much for getting out of here quietly. Red paused at the entrance hatch and glanced back. “What’d you hear?”

“It’s not what I heard, it’s what I know, and I know you’re not the only taller going off-planet. Poki left last night. I saw Sponch hoarding extra bagels the night before that. Everybody’d know if Irk sent something, so either Devastis is summoning Elites or somebody’s hacked the system.” Tenn huffed and flipped the wrench closed with a deft little click. “And I _know_ nobody’s hacked the system. Whatever’s going on…” She jabbed her thumb at the bare patches in the lines of parked ships. More than there ought to be in downtime. “…it’s big. You know, they say it’ll be Invasion Season soon.”

Of course they did. They’d been saying it every year for the last fifty years. It had been exciting the first couple times, back when Red was fresh above ground, short and dumb and troubleshooting turret sensors, but it got old fast. Always “soon,” never “now”. “Soon” was a guess, a wish, a waste of breath. Come back with hard numbers or shut up.

Still.

Red’s antennae gave a hungry little twitch, as if he’d scented something on the air. He absently rubbed his gauntlets. “Invasion Season, huh?” The thought had occurred to him more than once. Wishful thinking, yes, but it had to happen sometime. Why _not_ now?

Without another word, Red climbed into the cockpit and set course for Devastis. The hangar roof yawned open to reveal a flat sky waiting for him. Sump’s sun twinkled far in the distance.

One last time, he eyed the ships around him, the Vortian mechanics, the soldiers attending their duties. He thought of his own fleet of Irkens who’d followed him into the heart of battle, who’d flown and fought and died beside him for the last two decades. He’d probably never see them again.

Awesome. 

Almost as an afterthought, Red shot off a dry salute. “Later, losers.”

Back on the ground, Elite Tenn bobbed her wrench to him. A gesture of good luck.

Red put his feet on the dash and sipped his slooshie. “Don’t need it.”

**[SPACE. Cycle 17, Era 24]**

The reception was garbage out here. To be fair, it was garbage everywhere once you got a couple million miles past a planet’s solar system. Out past the regular traffic and satellites and space stations and junk, out of the shallows and deep into the thick of space. The _real_ stuff.

A dark void speckled with suns and stars slid past the windshield. The last few crumbs of Sump’s star system swirled and stretched iridescent in the rearview. Twenty minutes after that, it vanished completely. Thirty minutes after that, nothing but _The Lenient_ and a dark heartless void.

“It’s the hardest part of Elite flying,” Red’s old commander had once said between mouthfuls of sandwich. (Jellybean and mayo on rye, if Red remembered right.) “’Specially sucks when you’re not on fleet or armada duty. It’s the traveling _between_ missions that’ll get you. Boring, boring, BOR-ING. You’re eight-hundred lightyears from nowhere, nothing to look at, nothing to do, nobody to shoot. Get used to it, suckers.”

Other superiors said the same: “it’s dull”, “it’s bleak”, “it’s lonely”, “it’s so quiet you’ll rip out your own PAK and swallow it whole just so you won’t hear that incessant hum of the fan for hours and hours oh no there it is again merciful Irk why won’t it stop”, and so on.

All fancy ways of saying, “You’ll get some peace and quiet for once.”

Finally, some quality legroom. Red rolled his shoulders, leaned back in his contoured gel-padded chair, and stretched all of his limbs. And just because he could, he did it again. “Now these are the goals, people. Am I right?”

 _The Lenient_ ’s panels glittered in the dark. Silence. What a sound.

“Of course I am.”

No inferiors crowding his legs, whining about drills and rations. No Vortians getting their big stupid horns in his face. No tallers or former tallers giving him the sore loser stink-eye every five seconds. No incompetent fleet ships getting themselves blown up or hogging his space.

They might have had a point about the boredom, though. A little. Red tapped his monitor as if he could brush away the snowy static covering The Announcer’s face. The speakers popped and hissed in their valiant struggle to relay _Top Twenty Extinct Idiots Who Thought They Could Face The Irken Empire: Part 2, The Sequel_. Shifting starboard, the ship could scrape out a clear sentence or five, but not much more.

 _*kffsssst*_ _“—ust look at those little guys run! *kffst* “—hat’s what I’d call a real tongue twister—”_ _*ffsst*_ _“—should I say tongue_ ** _fister_** _? Ahaha!”_

“Guess I should’ve splurged on that entertainment package after all, huh?” Red patted _The Lenient’s_ control stick just to show no hard feelings.

She still had that clean clinical new-ship-smell, as she ought. Every part of her, rivets to reactors, came custom-ordered fresh off the factory line and assembled by Red’s own hand. (Good to know those years as a mechanic drone had been good for something.) All regulation, naturally, with some fancy bits suitable for a soldier of his stature. Only the best for the best.

Red flinched at the screech of radio static. Probably could’ve afforded that entertainment package if he hadn’t gone overboard on the drives and thrusters—and also ordered a new pair of boots—but it was worth it. For the price, it better have been.

Admittedly, that 80k debt set his teeth on edge when he thought about it too much. If rumors of Invasion Season were true, however, _The Lenient_ could pay herself off within a month. Even if not, an Elite’s payroll covered it in about a cycle. Seven years wasn’t too bad if he just cut back a little on snacks. Not counting drinks, of course. Red reached into the deluxe cupholder and took a long slurp of slooshie.

*kffst* _“—ou re—ember the Fweezians, old-timers? Think bigger—” *sst* “—less teeth!” *fffkkkssst*_ “ _—thou must make it count._ ”

That last bit sounded off. Too formal, too serious. And last Red checked, The Announcer’s voice didn’t sound so feminine. He didn’t have an accent either.

_“We’ve but one chance, but if we strike true—” *ksssh* “—wound the Irken Empire so badly ‘t’will take decades to—”_

Wait, what? Red sat up, one leg curled under him as he leaned in to adjust the signal.

_*krrshhh* “—whole lineup of royals just ripe for the rebellion. Ooops! Make that ripe for the slaughter! Ah, and herrrrre she comes! So long Tallest Fecks, all hail Almighty Tallest Miyuki. See ya, Prince Whatever.”_

The Announcer was back and coming in clearer now. That had to mean _The Lenient_ was nearing Devastis’ star system. Not exactly what he’d been looking for, though. He shifted the signal in the other direction. 

_“—vulnerable on the western hemisphere, so says Mauv.”_ There—the stray transmission. A distant signal glinting through the static, and by the sound of it, nothing good.

“ _Lenient_. Track that, if you can.” 

And she could. The star map display shifted, sprinkling dotted lines to trace a winding trail. They weren't far. Understandable, if they could cut through the broadcasts so easily. Anything strong enough to spray their signal all the way out here had to be running some serious power or significant tech.

Red checked his time and his maps. More than enough time for a detour. “Let’s go say hi.” 

_The Lenient_ snagged their signal and leaped hot on their trail. The debris of their transmission dragged behind them like the slime they were. These insurgents, whoever they were, had been messy. Careless. Not only could Red track where they were, but where they’d been.

From its launch point on the battlefronts of Callnowia, the renegade ship had skimmed the proposed conveyor belt planet a few times before meandering through the heart of the production district. Red chewed his straw and scanned his memory for what lived out there. Smoke Folk. Screwheads. A couple of Blob colonies. Larkazoids and Truffloids out on the far edges of the territory, if there were any left. Of course there were also assorted Irkens at their designated posts, but the ship couldn’t be one of their own. Red would’ve recognized an Imperial signal, and besides, no Irken out of the ground could be that sloppy with a data trail. No Irken would put up with this kind of anti-Empire talk, either.

At Foodcourtia, the mystery ship didn’t reroute so much as it tightened focus. Its looping meanders suddenly snapped into a clean line, all straight shots and sharp angles. From there they’d stopped at an asteroid or five—these guys sure liked their convenience stores—but aside from that, it had a set course. Meaning _The Lenient_ could weed out the final destination.

 _“—of course the intel’s correct! Why wouldn’t it be? Do you think Mauv doesn’t know what he’s doing, or do the last four years mean nothing to you now?”_ New voice. Male. Kinda overdramatic. _“Look, you hurt his feelings.”_ The speakers still fuzzed and squeaked on the hard consonants, but the signal came in clear. They were close. Maybe a lightyear away.

“Hey _Lenient_ , are we close enough to hack their navigation system?” 

She gave it a shot and… nope. That didn’t surprise him; the ship was still a good distance away, and it wouldn’t surprise him if they hadn’t even locked in a destination. Red just had to work with his best guess.

A proposed flight path sprouted from the rogue ship’s current position and branched out to circle five potential planetary destinations and eight convenience asteroids.

“Hm.” With his free hand, Red pulled up the Era Twenty-Four Price Guide on a side screen and checked the current bounty rates for insurgent forces.

Dragging in a wasted crew (he’d heard at least three aboard), the monies covered a new pair of Elite-issue boots with plenty left over for primo snacks. Brought in alive, the bounty covered new boots, extra snacks, five nap passes, and nullified a quarter of his debt. And that was just the base rate.

“ _Lenient_ , highlight the current path and let’s see the most likely target.” Though he already had a decent guess.

Planet Devastis lit up like The Tallest on Probing Day.

Red grinned. “Yep.” He wouldn’t even have to waste time with a rerouted chase; at this speed, their paths naturally dovetailed in under an hour. But hey, why wait?

 _The Lenient_ ’s N.Y.O.O.M. drive flared. She kicked up double-time and closed the distance in five minutes. Caught the renegade ship in two more.

“I love you, ship.”

Pity the same couldn’t be said for the scrapheap floating in front of him. Thin lines of tiny windows ran the perimeter of a triangular vessel for small-to-midsize sentients. Her thrusters were a joke, and anybody with an ounce of self respect wouldn’t have been caught dead with that minimum-wage paint job. A peeling “ **IRKEN EMPIRE SUXX >8C**” sticker flapped pathetically on the side.

If she packed any firepower, Red couldn’t see it and _The Lenient_ couldn’t detect it. Understandable. At a glance, she’d originally been a civilian vessel—repackaged from freight delivery or cartography or astrogation or something. If her current crew couldn’t even afford a decent paint job (Irk’s sake, who flew _silver_ anymore?) they sure couldn’t afford to install cannons.

The signal came crystal-clear now. _“Uh, team? Don’t look now, but we’ve got company.”_

Unless it was disguised. Unless these guys were serious. Sneaking under the radar as a delivery ship full of morons wouldn’t have been a bad plan… ignoring the fact that a freight wandering into Irken airspace was like a bubblefink landing in an acid marsh.

 _“What are—aw, no. No, no, no,_ please _tell me that’s not what I think it is.”_

He had found someone really smart, or someone really REALLY stupid. Like, Category 7 levels of stupid. And if spraying their data trail all over the stars like some love-struck Rat was any indication (and it was), Red cast his bet on stupid. 

_“I dunno, do you think it’s an Irken ship? ‘Cause if not, then it’s not that.”_

Someone with an exceptionally annoying voice swore in the background. Loudly.

_“Fear not, Mauv. I hold fast to my word; we shan’t let them touch you.”_

Red sniffed. “Don’t make promises you can’t keep, lady.”

The guy in the background—Mauv, apparently—cursed even louder. Probably knew he was doomed. Smart guy.

_“Get us starboard, Plinka! Boot the warp dr—what do you mean the warp’s dead?! We updated the system last month, it’s brand new!”_

No drive at all, then. Not even a flimsy delivery warp. “Huh. Lucky break.” No visible weaponry and no audible orders to retaliate confirmed Red’s suspicions. The ship was toothless. But just in case…

 _The Lenient's_ turrets took aim and spat one, two, three vibration pulses; one for each corner of the ship. The renegade vessel stopped dead in its tracks. Her lights flickered for a second, then went dark.

Red turned down the radio signals before the crew’s screaming gave him a headache. His claws twitched against the ingrained reflex to blow the thing to space dust. One shot. That’s all it’d take.

But without solid identification or even confirmation of insurgent activity, he’d get credit for eliminating an unregistered ship at best. Bounties needed bodies (or at least 51% of one).

Fine, he’d do it the old fashioned way. Manually.

The opaque helmet snapped around Red’s head with a click—a slick little number with reflective black visors and vent spikes on the sides. Spikes were cooler than fins.

 _The Lenient_ swooped close. Her cables lashed out to snag the other ship’s airlock, clamping down like a lamprey.

He opened communications. “Hey! You’ve got eight minutes to give me one good reason why you’re in restricted Irken military territory.” 

The call went through audio-only. “Sheesh,” Red mumbled under his breath, “how old IS this heap?” Using a visual call like the rest of civilized society would’ve given a better idea of what he went up against, too. Oh well.

 _“Wait,”_ said the overdramatic guy. Someone in the background spilled their drink in a flurry of activity. _“Wait, can he hear us?”_

_“Methinks he can.”_

_“Well, who opened the feed? Taso, did you sit on something?”_

_“H-hey, don’ lookit me! Mauv’s in charge of the communication and—”_

_“Oh goodness, Mauv! I forgot all about him. Tinka, make sure he’s somewhere safe.”_

Voices spilled over each other in the growing chaos while someone (the female?) tried and failed to keep everyone calm. You’d think they’d have seen it coming. What, did they really think they could just cruise around space without running into even one Irken ship? Maybe they’d been running on luck this whole time and gotten overconfident.

In the corner of Red’s eye, his gauntlet blipped. He glanced at the incoming communique. Something coming from… Foodcortia? Red rolled his eyes and flipped the panel closed. Of course it’d be _now_ that Foodcourtia tried to sell him coupons or whatever.

The connection cables went taut as the ports clicked, locking on both ships. Connection secure. Prepare to be boarded, douchebags.

 _The Lenient’s_ airlock opened with a rolling hiss. Red took a quick inventory check and slipped in. The thump of his boots echoed through the slick metal tubing. At the end of his path, a green circle of light pulsed slow and steady.

Red could already see the shifting shadows and silhouettes of his enemies. He crouched low, pressed against the warm tubing as he crept closer.

Flashes of something white and furry moved in the dim emergency generator’s lights. Red’s antennae perked straight up. The scent overwhelmed the cable tunnels. _Fweezian!_

The Collective Memory silently screamed out to him: a split-second clip show harvested from all who’d come before him and learned the hard way what Fweezians meant.

_War. Ten-year siege. Famine. Danger. Twenty-year siege. Dust. Fifty-year siege. Blackout. The sky’s all wings and lights and wings and eyes. Too bright! Death. Bad. TOO BRIGHT. Too much. Cold. Hurt. Scared. Rage. Rage. Rage._

_Beware._

_Be careful._

Red blinked, steadying himself of the walls of the connector cable. Remembered that the Snack Wars ended before he’d even left the Education Plug. The residual panic faded, but it echoed softly under his skin, thrumming through his muscles: _Be careful, soldier. Be careful._

He blinked again. Harder. Okay, so at least one moth on board. How about the others?

The tips of Red’s antennae bobbed and twitched at the scents and vibrations of two, five… no, seven individuals ahead: one Truffloid, a few Screwheads, one Fweezian (which he should’ve figured out from the audio transmission), and someone else. The seventh crew member had a weak familiar scent but he couldn’t isolate it through the stink of the Truffloid on board.

 _Yeah, that’s doable._ Red nodded to himself. Alright, new plan:

  1. Forcefully board ship (Done).
  2. Subdue/neutralize insurgent crew (optional: alive).
  3. Collect bounty monies.
  4. Obtain snacks.
  5. Obtain boot replacement, additional snack.
  6. Report for duty on Devastis.
  7. Obtain praise, promotions, sweet new encodings, be awesome forever.
  8. Wash _The Lenient_.



The Fweezie sat at the control panel, rubbing her foxlike face with one hand while the other three struggled to bring the ship system back online. Two Screwheads crowded around her, whispering between themselves. The Truffloid huddled in a nearby chair, floppy mushroom cap bent around her head like a fancy sunhat. The others couldn’t be accounted for. Hiding, maybe. Hopefully they wouldn’t be too much of a pain to track down.

The long stalks of the Truffloid’s fingers clasped together, and the damp sour stink of her fear clung to the air. “Has he said anything else? It’s been kinda quiet.” Hopefully, she glanced about the cabin. “You don’t suppose he’s decided to reconsider? O-or just leave us alone?”

“If you seriously believe that,” one of the Screwheads snorted, “I’ve got a bridge in East Twinfast to sell you.”

His fellow Screwhead gave a humorless smile over his shoulder. “You would if wasn’t demolished last month.”

“Yeah, but maybe if we could just reason with him?” This Truffloid really didn’t want to let it go. “I mean, lookit how it turned out with—”

The Fweezian raised a wing. Ragged old wounds split the delicate lacy membrane—seared and scarred from an Irken blaster. Functional, but (hopefully) useless for flight. She hadn’t taken her eyes off the control panel. “Pray, gentle Taso, thou must understand our own Mauv stands as the exception, not the norm. For all things the Irken race is known for, the quality of mercy stands not amongst them.” Her plumed antennae curled inward, twitching against the back of her chair. With a little sigh, she smoothed the frills of her musty uniform and glanced over her shoulder. The pupils in her enormous blue eyes narrowed into slits. “Is that not true, soldier?”

On cue, the others turned to behold the figure stepping out of their airlock.

“Yeah. Sure is.” Pulling himself to full height, Red’s shadow stretched along the walls until it touched the ceiling. Clad in a space-worthy uniform the wounded scarlet of an imploding sun, Red made towards them. He stared behind a black visor bleak and fathomless as a really spooky thing that couldn’t be fathomed. A black hole, maybe.

That mirror practice had really paid off.

The ragtag collection of rebels tensed. Both Screwheads pulled close together. One reached for a weapon.

“I wouldn’t.” A pair of blasters sprang from his PAK, already trained on their targets. Crud, he’d meant to say something smart and intimidating when he came in. “Time’s up, by the way.” Yeah, that worked.

In the thick of the main cabin, the familiar scent grew stronger. Red tried to isolate it, but the Truffloid had gone into panic mode. Under the stench of spores and sweat, he couldn’t even smell himself. These things were disgusting.

Red took a quick headcount while one of the Screwheads went into a series of lame threats or a speech or whatever. Something something, can’t kill ideas, something something, heart of the rebellion, something something freedom. The usual.

There’d been seven on board; he knew that for sure. Four here, three more in the rear chambers. Right? Red glanced at the hollows dug into the sides of the cabin: a series of cubby holes large enough to squeeze into. Each one had a pillow. Each one stocked with trinkets, posters, blankets, and photos—stray shrapnel from the crew’s personal lives. They’d been sleeping in here.

Yet they flew a mid-size cruiser. These things came standard with at least two compartments—three, counting the engine room—with one acting as a dedicated living/sleeping space. Seven crew members split across two rooms meant only one should’ve been sleeping out in the cabin, if even that. Not unless they had a Blob or something on board, but anything that huge would’ve left evidence of itself.

Did they use the spare rooms for cargo storage? Red frowned. He hadn’t altered his whole schedule for a bunch of pirates, had he?

In the background, the passionate Screwhead had moved into the second paragraph of his speech.

Nah. Pirates weren’t this preachy.

“Sir. Fellow soldier.” It came from one of the Screwheads. The one with the shorter screw who’d been quiet until now.

Red’s head snapped around. Had that thing just…?

“Please, you don’t must to do this.” The words came raw, poorly conjugated and untranslated. Because it didn’t need to be translated. 

The Screwhead was speaking Irken.

Hardly daring to move, the Fweezian and the Truffloid exchanged a look. The other Screwhead had gone the color of bleached burlap.

“Be this way, not-must it need be!” It got worse. Either he’d been working from a practiced script or he’d just realized his mistake and panicked. Or both. “Your enemies be ours enemy. This, know…” The rest of the sentence trailed away pathetically.

“ _Excuse_ me?” Red’s voice hissed soft. “Off-worlder, I think I must’ve misheard that.” He stalked closer. “Repeat yourself.”

The Fweezie braced hard against her chair. “Oh Tinka,” she whispered, “what did you _do_?”

The Screwhead (Tinka, apparently) stood firm, surprisingly. Stupidly. “Well, what else can we do? Taso’s right, we should at least try, or else what kind of hypocrites are we?”

“Thou needn’t try like _that_! Moon save us, of all the profitless endeavors I’ve never—”

“Nobody was talking to you, moth. You.” Red’s PAK blaster tapped the Screwhead’s temple. “Repeat yourself, I said. Now.”

He did. It was even more putrid the second time around.

“Okay, I have _got_ to be hearing things. My translator’s busted or malfunctioning or something because I know…” Red shook his head with a furious little chuckle. “I know I did _not_ just hear MY language just come out of YOUR disgusting off-worlder face.”

How had the grody thing even learned it? Or even _heard_ it? Red could understand if it’d been the moth—their languages had similar roots here and there—but still, Irkens kept their stuff on lockdown. The translators naturally hid their native language, even when speaking to each other.

Even if it had been overheard, a novice couldn’t pick up more than a handful of nouns at best. This Screwhead had actually managed a half-coherent sentence. He’d spoken the language before. He’d had practice. Which meant someone had to have _taught_ him.

Red’s squeedlyspooch twisted. _I think I’m gonna be sick._

“Listen.” This Screwhead didn’t know when to quit, did he? “I meant no offense.”

To his credit, the one called Tinka truly didn’t seem to understand the gravity of what he’d just done. He was just exceptionally stupid. Didn’t make it any less repugnant, though.

After a moment to calm himself, Red turned to him again. “In that case, tell me what you wanted to tell me. And keep my language out of it this time.”

A frown wrinkled across the Fweezie’s muzzle. She glanced at the Truffloid, who’d perked up hopefully, and tisked.

Tinka looked to his fellows—none of them seemed to specifically be in charge—and when nobody reproached him, he tried again. Same stuff as before, smoother coherent sentences this time. He tried to draw commonalities between himself and Red, as if sharing military backgrounds erased species lines.

He pleaded that Red could be “better” and “more than this”. Weird take from a Screwhead, but true enough. One always had room to improve, to grow higher, to elevate. Constant improvement, constant progress. Of course Red could be more. That’s why he’d been headed to Devastis in the first place.

It almost seemed as if this Screwhead had some sense. “In the end, your enemies are our enemies.” Until that, anyway.

Red tilted his head to the side. The spoot was that supposed to mean?

“The Empire,” the one called Tinka said. “The Empire hurts everyone, even you. They’ve hurt you the same way they’ve…” He blinked at the Fweezian’s ruined wing. “Well, not the exact same way, but…”

“Uh-huh.” With a shift of the shoulder, the helmet retracted into his suit. Red arched an eyebrow and smirked. “You sure about that?”

There’s a look everyone gets when they know they’re boned. Not outmatched, not defeated, not bested. Completely and utterly screwed now and forever. No do-overs, no take-backs. That’s it. It’s over. Say bye to life, say hi to your ghosts and gods if you’ve got ‘em.

Red had to admit, face-to-face work had its perks. It had been a long time since he’d seen that look.

The crew stared at the simple icon burned into the Irken soldier’s forehead. That last 00.5% of hope they’d held onto since _The Lenient’s_ appearance withered and died. “An Elite,” one of them whispered.

They should’ve figured that out from the sweet ride and uniform, but hope made people kind of dumb sometimes. Hope or misplaced confidence. Screwheads and Truffloids might have been stupid, but they weren’t morons. Clearly from their scars and anti-Empire pamphlets (anti-Empire but _not_ anti-Irken, interestingly) they understood the threat they faced.

Yet something had given them the sheer gall to think they could’ve talked Red down. A familiarity.

Red’s antennae twitched, freer outside the helmet. That scent hiding under the stench of off-worlders. He knew it now. “You’ve got an Irken aboard.” It explained the language stuff, the lack of total panic, everything. 

There’d been a rush to hide someone when Red’s ship appeared. “That’s this… Mauv guy, right?” He looked amongst the jerry-rigged garbage crew, got no answer, and shrugged. “Thought so. I don’t suppose any of you are gonna tell me where he is?”

Nope. Stubborn defiance all around. It wouldn’t take much to squeeze a confession out of them, but information extraction took too much time that he’d already wasted.

With a great roll of his eyes, Red turned for the remaining chambers of the ship. “Fiiine. Gotta do everything myself.” One of the PAK blasters swiveled backwards as he approached the door. “None of you move; I don’t want to shoot anybody and lose my premium.”

In hindsight, he should’ve brought along a Capture Capsule™ or a pocket web or something. “Whatever, I’m five seconds from the planet. It’s fine.”

As expected, the first hub housed the main engines and hardware. Signs of Screwhead manufacturing covered the room top to bottom, all dust and grit. Nobody’d touched it since completion. Except…

Red squinted at the engine’s entry compartment: a shiny clean rectangle glinting in the grime. He swiped his finger along the side. Cleaner than an autoclave. 

“Huh.” Someone had come digging in here recently, and definitely not a Screwhead. The disinfectant killed their scent and prints, whoever they’d been.

Approaching the second door, Red’s gauntlet blipped. It detected another Irken PAK on the premises. No signal until he’d gotten into close range, either; someone had jammed it.

That meant whoever waited behind that door was one of two things: a prisoner or a defective. Or a prisoner kept so long that they’d lost all senses and _become_ defective, if such a thing were possible. Though he hated to think it, all evidence pointed towards the second option. That Screwhead insurgent had been convinced that Red’s betrayal—no, his defection—from the Irken Empire was not only possible but _correct_. He’d had the confidence of someone who’d seen it before. 

All of them almost jumped out of their skin the second Red mentioned another Irken aboard. Not just fear of being caught, no, that had been _concern_. Nobody got that worried about enemy prisoners. Not unless they’d stopped being enemies.

The two Irken signals practically sat on top of each other. _He’s in there alright._

Showtime. Red took a long drag of his slooshie, holstered it, and shot two pulses into the door. It melted into a smoldering puddle in the hallway to reveal…

Donuts.

Boxes and boxes of donuts. All arranged in haphazard rows and cardboard columns, half of them open, and all of them (regrettably) empty.

Not only donut boxes, either. Looking closer, Red discovered the debris of a banquet fit for a planetary warlord (or at least a high-rank governor). Old napkins, fry cartons, soda cups, sandwich crusts, candy wrappers, and crumpled bags of chips rustled in the air conditioning. Popcorn kernels cracked underfoot. Flecks of nacho cheese sprinkled the walls and rainbow sprinkles freckled the floor. Straws slanted half-mast in hollow ice cream cartons. Cans of whipped cream and Instant Fruit clustered along the shelves in herds. And that was just the first layer.

For a moment, Red could only stare. His insides gave an undisciplined growl, even though he’d just eaten monthly rations a week ago.

A beep pierced the air. Red snapped back to his senses. He pivoted on his heel, blaster raised, and in one clean shot, blew up a microwave.

“HEY!” Someone coughed inside the clouds of smoke and microwave dust. That same irritating voice from the audio feed. The one they called Mauv. “What’s the big idea?!”

Red squinted over the fortress of snack boxes. Within it laid a cozy nest of pillows and blankets arranged upon a large pliable cushion. I looked kind of like a couch, and not the bouncy hard kind used for nap passes, either. This was the sink-down, foam padded, feather-stuffed, luxurious lie-down-and-never-want-to-get-up stuff of Vortian couches. Looking closer, he realized it had no armrests or backboards.

A bed. Not a bunk, not a cot, not a couch. An honest-to-Irk actual _bed_.

In the center of it all, cocooned in Fweezian silks and furs, another Irken frowned at him. He sprawled taut with an odd kink in his back, either coiled to strike or tuck in for illegal naptime. His eyes—the rich violet of grape smoothies and shiny wet intestines—narrowed, annoyed. As if someone had forgotten to put chocolate shavings on his sundae. He held a fresh plate of steaming pizza rolls.

“If you wanted one you could’ve just asked, sheesh.” Mauv brushed a stray chunk of microwave glass off his robed shoulder. “I wouldn’t have given you one, but I probably would have thought about it.”

“I…” Red blinked at the room, still dazed by the sheer decadence of it all. “What IS all of this?”

“Oh! Neat, huh?” He bounced himself on the cushions. Silk blankets billowed out in waves of supreme coziness. “They call it a bed. A lot of species haven’t evolved out of needing sleep, so they use it for their temporary shut-downs. I’ve been using it as a snacking couch though, so I dunno if technically it still counts as—”

“I _know_ what a bed is!” Red unclenched his fist. The situation called for calm procedural questioning. Cool and calm. He unclenched his other fist. “I mean what are you doing here?”

“Working.” Mauv blew on a pizza roll and popped it into his mouth. “Obviously.” Stretching, he rubbed the hunch in his back. “You’re kinda rude, you know that? Blowing up someone else’s microwave and walking into their mission like this.” He glanced over his shoulder with a sniff. “Didn’t anyone teach you not to interrupt your tallers?”

That tore it.

Red pounced.

The full force of his PAK legs lashed out and slammed down hard. Pierced something soft and wriggly. Cloudbursts of fur and feathers rolled through the air. Razored tips of the PAK leg scraped the solid metal beneath the blankets.

Missed.

The Irken known as Mauv crouched a few feet away with his smug stupid fat stupid face full of pizza roll. He swallowed, frowning. “I liked that blanket...” He swept backwards to duck Red’s second strike. Didn’t even drop the snacks. “For an Elite, you’re not too good at this.”

Red reached into his PAK, searching the weapon compartment for something sharp and deadly. Found only blasters—no good here. Not unless he wanted quadruple-digit fines on top of his debt. Fine; this skreg didn’t deserve a quick death anyway.

He rushed the traitor again. Red’s claws caught Mauv’s robed shoulder and yanked him backward.

The defect’s antennae sprang up in surprise. He dodged, but his bare feet slipped on the rumpled satin. “Whoa!” Scrambling, he reached out to catch the plate of pizza rolls before they hit the ground.

Mauv tucked and sprang before Red’s boot could smash his eye. “When’s the last time you did any hand-to-hand, last cycle?” His tongue coiled around another roll and snapped it up. “Last _decade_?”

Red’s PAK leg whistled through empty air. “Stay STILL, you gutless defect! You’re disgusting—out here, nestled up and getting all snoozly with off-worlders. What would _you_ know about the Irken Elite?”

Even as he said it, Red couldn’t believe it. He should have found a broken prisoner hacking up blood in a prison cell. A foot-high drone gone half-crazy and full turncoat. A brainwashed engineer begging for death with his eyes. Red had expected damaged PAKs, hacked systems, viruses—weakness and failure.

But no. No, this gangly puke-pail dodged, swiveled, and sprang with the easy grace of an arena fighter. And even if this Mauv guy wasn’t his taller—and he **_wasn’t_** —he clearly had some significant height on him. Yet even with height, rank, and the respect of his race, _even_ _still_ he’d thrown in his lot with Irk’s enemies. A level of defection unimaginable.

The other Irken raised an eyebrow. “Uh. Because I am one?”

“You’re gonna pay for this, you two-faced—I’m sorry, what?” Red lowered arms and blinked. Slowly, their earlier conversation came back to him. He’d said something about a mission. “What’s your business here?”

“I _told_ you I was working, you moron.” The Irken formerly known as “Mauv” pulled a wet cloth from his PAK and rubbed it on his forehead. Green concealer and bits of tomato sauce wiped away to reveal an Irken Elite icon. “Elite Purple, division of Infiltration and Information Extraction. And I think the better question is, what’s _your_ business here, butting in on someone’s assignment without any clearance?”

Red put a hand on his hip and sneered, “Since when do you need clearance to engage an enemy vessel?”

“Buh!” Purple’s hands gestured wildly at some invisible answer. “What part of _Infiltration_ Division don’t you get?!”

“Why didn’t YOU say something?”

“I sent a stand down signal, what more do you want?”

A likely story. Red pointedly ignored the unread Foodcourtia communique still blinking on his gauntlet. “I dunno maybe a simple ‘don’t shoot, we’re on the same team’? Besides, you look pretty cozy from the looks of—”

“Um, Mauv? Are you okay in…” The Truffloid in the doorway put her reedy fingers against her mouth. She looked between Red and the messy Elite insignia on Purple’s forehead. “…oh. Oh goodness.”

She hadn’t come alone. Behind her, the Fweezian stared with bright furious eyes.

Before Red could move, the silent scent signal hit him: _HOLD. WAIT. PLEASE._

The Fweezie’s fuzzy antennae perked and twitched; she’d smelled it too. Gotten a stronger whiff, by the look of it. She hesitated in the doorway with an odd little expression.

Red followed her line of sight and did a double-take.

Another Irken stood in Purple’s place. He was a pathetic little thing, sickly and hollow-eyed, stooped so low his antennae drooped past his knees. The once luxurious robe, now bedraggled and damaged from the scuffle, hung sideways off his thin shoulder. Someone could’ve beaten him to death with a feather. This one here, this was the one known as Mauv.

A handy trick, Red had to admit. Demeaning, revolting, and vomit-inducing, but handy. Kind of.

“O-oh, Taso! Lady Greendown! Oh, I’m so happy you’re alright. I went to hide somewhere safe like Tinka told me too, but when I heard all the commotion I got worried. When I came out I found, um…” He glanced at Red.

Red stared back, no help at all.

“I found this guy! We’ve been talking, and gosh, I think there’s been a misunderstanding.” Purple clasped his fingers together with a hopeful little smile sweet enough to rot Fluoriden steel.

The Fweezian’s wings flared at her back. She didn’t return his smile. “Aye, so I see. By the crest impressed upon thine fair head, thou sharest much with this ally, indeed. ‘Mauv’.”

“Uh.” Purple cringed close to his pillow nest. “The thing about that is, see, before the evil empire chased me out I used to…” He sighed. “Aw, screw it.”

In one smooth movement, Purple reached behind his back and pulled out a long metal bracer. His spine popped and cracked as he dragged himself up to his true height.

He rose to meet Red eye to eye.

Same height. They were the exact same height. Right down to the curve of their heads and the tips of their antennae.

How _dare_ he.

Elite Purple looked Red up and down with a surprised little hum. “How about that? I’m really not your taller after all. How are you tall as me and still this—”

A throwing knife hissed over his shoulder. It thunked into the wall, veins of ice spiderwebbing over the varnish.

“I knew it!” The Fweezie rushed them. She smashed through snack debris, waves of pizza crust and donut boxes crashing behind her. Out of her pocket flashed a knife. With a flick, the knife extended to a spear—curved, wicked, and gleaming. “I _knew_ we couldn’t trust you bugs!”

The blade caught the collar of Purple’s robe and sent it fluttering across the room. He tucked and rolled to avoid a Screwhead leaping through the doorway. “Great, _now_ look what you did. I had a great thing going and you just had to ruin it!” He rounded on the Fweezian. “And who’re you calling bug, _moth_? What kind of language is that for an altruist? So much for peace and love.”

The Screwhead’s massive hammer smashed inches from Red’s torso. PAK legs clawed at the screw as Red kicked him in the ribs. “I found a rogue ship hovering vital Irken territory and leaking raid plans all over the circuit! What was I supposed to do, ride by and ignore it?”

“Yes!” Chased into a corner, Purple’s PAK gripped the walls and climbed for it. “Didn’t any of that seem weird to you? I mean, what moron decides to attack _Devastis_ of all places?!”

The Truffloid drooped sadly in the corner. “Hey…”

Purple shrugged. “Sorry, Taso, but that plan really was the worst.”

The Screwhead’s hammer slammed the wall. Hard enough for Purple’s legs to lose grip. “I wasn’t gonna say anything, but…”

“You’re not sorry at all,” the mushroom sniffed.

“No, but thanks for the free ride to—WHOA!” The hammer vibrations shook Purple off the wall. He crashed into a mountain of fry cartons and booked it before the hammer smashed his head into jelly. “Would you cut that out?!”

Red caught the harsh scent of frost. Dodged too late. 

The Fweezian spear caught his shoulder and bit deep. Sub-zero shocks of venom shot through his system. Red staggered backward, wheezing as his right arm went numb; freezing from the inside out. His PAK hummed in turn as it countered with anti-venom.

The Fweezian’s wings—grounded but functional—hummed and buzzed around his head. Rapid winks of light flashed off her scales. Searing. Blinding. It swerved at the sight of Red’s blaster.

Wheezing, and half-blinded, Red swung towards the light and fired.

Several screamed—Red, included. Had he just shot a Fweezian in the face? One of the fancy kinds? _Over two hundred-thousand monies down the drain!_

When the light dissipated, he found the Fweezie clutching her bottom left arm. A nasty green mass of fur and blood hanging by a thread. She gritted her teeth and watched his blaster warily.

Red coughed against the chill in his chest. “Get cute and I’ll shoot off the other three.”

The PAK blaster threateningly reared over his back to show he meant it. It beeped for a reload.

Purple looked up from where he had the Truffloid pinned in a corner. “Maybe next time, don’t waste your shots on an innocent microwave—HEY!” He ducked the empty blaster chucked at his skull.

It ricocheted off the wall, caught the Truffloid in the mouth, and knocked her out cold.

Purple skittered up the wall before anyone could knock him off this time. “I’m on your side, you know!”

“Hand slipped.” Red rolled his numb shoulder and shifted backwards.

And here came the last Screwhead—the one who’d tried talking Red down before. Judging from the spiked hammer he held, Red guessed that peace talks had finally broken down.

He mentally flipped through his armory: acid spitters, saws, legs… weapons to maim, not subdue. Oh, well. Red tugged the Fweezian knife out of the wall and rushed the Screwhead.

The Screwhead swung back at him, but he got distracted trying not to step on the unconscious Truffloid. The swings came slow and middling. He couldn’t bring the hammer down without accidentally hitting her. Finally, that mushroom was good for something.

Red took his opening and tackled.

Above them, high on the ceiling, Purple gave a crow of triumph. “ _There_ it is!”

An air vent crashed to the floor. The brawl broke apart, and one by one, the fighters looked up.

Purple waved back at them. Slowly, he dragged out a massive metal chest out of an air vent. With a twist and a leap, he landed in a wreckage of pillows and candy wrappers. Out sprang a blaster of his own, not trained on his attackers, but the chest at his feet.

“Lucky for you, Elite, _one_ of us thought ahead. Watch and learn.” Grinning with all his teeth, Purple kicked the lid open. “OKAY, nobody move! I’ve got a hostage!”

“Uh, Elite?” Red tapped his shoulder. “I think you might want to check that.”

Purple glanced down. Slowly, he lifted the blanket covering the lumps inside and blinked at the contents. Poked them a little. Lifted a little moth wing and watched it flop back down. “Oh, right. You’re supposed to feed these things, aren’t you?”

Well, that explained the missing crew members. Red winced and ignored the horrified shrieks and sobs of rage behind him. (That Fweezie had some lungs on her. At least she wasn’t after him this time.) “How did you live in here all this time and not notice? Couldn’t you smell them?”

Purple’s PAK legs clashed against the Fweezie’s spear, tangling around it. He grasped hard and swung both moth and spear over his shoulder. The tip snapped, leaving him with a fancy stick. “It’s _always_ smelly in here.” He jabbed the splintered fancy stick at the Screwhead coming from his left. “I live with a Truffloid.”

Okay, fair.

Movement blurred in the corner of Red’s eye. Red grabbed the remains of the microwave and smashed it on the Screwhead’s skull at the same time the hammerhead came down on his damaged boot. 

Eighty pounds of steel slammed Red’s exposed foot. It cracked.

Red buckled. He grabbed a ledge to prop himself, grinding his teeth against the pain. More than there should have been. Shouldn’t his PAK have administered the painkillers by now? He rolled his right shoulder with a deep shuddering breath. The PAK was still busy dosing antivenom and rebuilding nerve centers. Great.

He eyed the unconscious Screwhead beneath him. The sharp tip of his PAK leg scraped along the thin skin of the Screwhead’s throat. It’d be a quick throat puncture. Barely any effort at all. Red’s broken foot screamed in agony. Bounties just needed a body… but still only half the amount for a live one.

Red withdrew the PAK leg, shifting his weight onto it. That’s what legs were for, after all. He curled the real leg against himself, groaning at the relieved pressure on his injured foot, and looked around.

The room’s chaos had dialed down to a simmer. On the far side of the room, Purple held the second Screwhead at gunpoint under his boot and the Fweezie at a stalemate. That was the nice thing about weak-hearted species and hostages. You could always find replacements.

At a glance, the worst damage had been to the Fweezie’s arm. Maybe a skull fracture on the Screwhead if Red had thrown that microwave hard enough. Nothing that couldn’t be fixed. Excluding the hostages Purple forgot to feed, they could land with the crew intact. 

Good. A couple of hiccups along the way, but still good. “Okay.” Red took a deep breath, realigned himself, and let the agony in his foot fade to background noise. When he exhaled and opened his eyes, he found Purple’s gaze upon him.

The Elite arched an eyebrow and leaned his neck forward, interested. Thinking. His eyes flicked to the unconscious Screwhead. The compromised boot on Red’s mangled foot. Back to the conscious Screwhead and fuming Fweezian at gunpoint.

Purple’s antennae perked high and twitched. “Oh.” He smiled a little, and Red didn’t like a single thing about it.

Nothing in Red’s expression had changed. He stared back flat, expressionless.

It didn’t matter. The snotloaf dug it out anyway. “Now I get it. It’s a monies thing.” The little smile curled and grew teeth. “Isn’t it? What, didja run into a gambling problem? Too many nights in the arena stands, shuttlebug?”

Red loped past him with a sneer, one careful eye still on the bleeding Fweezie. “I don’t think that’s any of your business. Look, it’s like you said, we’re eight minutes from Devastis. Right now let’s just focus on landing and getting these—”

Purple shoved his way into Red’s path. “Hey, you’re the one who boarded my ship.”

“YOUR ship?!” The Fweezian rounded on them with bared teeth and all her fur fluffed out. She kind of looked like an electrified snowcone.

“Hey. Excuse me.” The tip of Purple’s blaster poked the Fweezie in the nose. “We were in the middle of a conversation. Irk, why is everybody so rude today?” Purple put his free hand to his hip and spared her a glance. “The ship belonged to you, you’re Empire property, and I haven’t turned anything in yet. So yeah, _my_ ship.”

The snarling Fweezian’s needle teeth glinted in the low light. Her three working fists clenched hard. For a moment, it seemed as if the moth might ignore the blaster two centimeters from her face and do something stupid. But a Class Eight sapient had better sense than that. Instead, she stared him in the eye and said, low and livid and very clear, “We are nobody’s property.”

Which was a pretty silly thing to say. In the end, everybody belonged to somebody.

Red chuffed under his breath. “Don’t know why you’re looking at us like it’s _our_ fault. If you don’t wanna spin silk in a sweatshop, don’t lose a war.”

“I know, right? It’s that easy. Anyway, like I was saying, you boarded my ship, compromised my mission, totaled at least…” Purple did a quick body count. “…nine of my favorite pillows, killed an innocent microwave, AND ruined my nap. Explain the part where this isn’t my business.”

Please. As if this waste of space was even authorized for naps.

“I already told you, I found a rogue vessel in—you know what? No. I’m not having this conversation again.” 

There shouldn’t have even been a conversation. This was stupid. This whole thing was stupid. That was the trouble with other Irkens, nobody knew how to just shut up and do their stupid job. The sooner they landed, the sooner they could separate and never see each other again.

“It doesn’t matter. You wanna be that nosy, we can trade life stories when we’re back on the ground.” Red rubbed his broken foot while the PAK legs carried him out of range for Purple’s stupidness. He needed room to think. “Can we just worry about right now?”

Purple shrugged with an airy “Fine with me...”

“Fine.”

Red checked the time. Eighteen—no, seventeen minutes until he had to report for duty. Counting the time it’d take to dock ship and pass through decontamination, more like ten minutes. Playing around with this idiot and his stupid idiot mission had devoured all of Red’s excess time.

“Eugh.” Distantly, Red wondered if he’d need to split the haul with the other Elite. Did it even qualify for a bounty if they’d already been accounted for in an infiltration mission? Probably.

Next to the clock, in the corner of his gauntlet’s screen, the Foodcourtia messages from earlier were still blinking. Red skimmed quickly through them: one ad for snack coupons and two _Do Not Engage_ messages. Too late for that now. _Eyes forward, Red._

According to the price guide, insurgents under infiltration could still be harvested. Worst case scenario, Red would have to split the bounty, which would bring it to a little over half 100k, assuming the moth’s fancy coloring wasn’t a fluke. Not quite enough for all of _The Lenient_ ’s modification debt, but it covered the majority. And it still got him new boots.

Alright, so Capture Plan 2.0:

  1. Lock down remaining insurgents (Done).
  2. Replace boot. Repair foot (if time).
  3. Obtain snacks.
  4. Report for duty
  5. Bribe new commander with snacks to apologize for near-tardiness.
  6. Punch Elite Purple in the throat (stabbing also acceptable).
  7. Obtain additional snack.
  8. Wash The Lenient.
  9. Mop up the blood and dispose of the body that Elite Purple had just shot in the face— wait.



…Wait.

Wait, WHAT?!

Red stared in horror at the dead Screwhead at his feet. Dark blue blood stained his boots and soaked through his exposed sock. “I—you?! WHY DID YOU—?!”

“Whups.” Purple blew the smoke off his blaster muzzle. He looked him dead in the eye. “Finger slipped.”

Merrily, Purple skipped out of strangling range and pulled the plate of pizza rolls out of his PAK. They were still hot and steaming. “So, neat fact about that guy. His name’s Tinka. Nice fella—knew how to make a mean Instant Fruit salad. Sang nice little Screwhead songs to me when I was faking trauma episodes.” He popped a pizza roll in his mouth and gestured to the one Red had conked with the microwave. “He escaped the Belts a few years ago along with his brother over there.”

“What’s that got to do… with…” Red’s thoughts bounced back to him. _Everybody belongs to somebody._

But these two Screwheads weren’t just conquered inhabitants. They’d been actively enslaved, escaped, and then quietly recaptured by the Empire. Purple may have been the one who’d fired the shot, but Red created the circumstances which had led to that shot. He had been the one who’d initiated the attack by compromising the infiltration mission. Meaning the blame ultimately came down on him, so…

“Anyway, it’s a good thing you’re not hurting for monies, ‘cause—” Purple gestured to the Screwhead’s body, spitting bits of pizza roll as he spoke. “—looks like you owe the Irken Empire ten thousand.”

Red leveled a flat stare at Purple’s comfy little smirk. Slowly, he closed his fingers around a chunk of loose shrapnel. With the heartless precision of an Irken Elite, he threw it and sent the plate tumbling out of Purple’s hands.

Lights stuttered above them. Not dull orange emergency lights, but the bright whites of the main system. It happened again. How did—

Purple’s fist smashed into Red’s cheek.

Red went reeling backward, his good boot slipping through blood and blankets and pillow feathers. He stumbled into the hall behind him, righted himself and parried the second fist before it caught him between the eyes. PAK legs clawed the walls for leverage, braced, and ricocheted Red into his target.

They collided—a gnashing, slashing, flailing, hissing knot of fists and claws and legs and arms and metal. Environments whirled as the fight shifted out of the halls and into the bridge.

“You scuzzsack! You _absolute_ SCUZZSACK! Who the spoots do you think you are, barging in here tearing up nests and snackpiles like you own the place?” Purple’s claws clamped around Red’s antenna and bashed his skull into the control panel. Hard. “You know how long I had those rolls in the microwave? Like twenty minutes!”

Claws dug deep into the flesh of Red’s head. Dragged him up and slammed him again. Drew back with a yelp when the heel of Red’s boot hit him in the spooch.

That was a nice sound. Red flipped over and kicked him again. “Aw, poor baby.” He hacked a glob of bright pink and bloodied spit right in Purple’s big ugly face.

“AUGH YOU GOT IT IN MY MOUTH!”

“So sorry doing my duty messed up your squeeby little naptime.” But for a soft squeeb, the fucker still hit like a railgun. And he still had Red’s antenna clenched in his glove. “You’re gonna make me late screwing around here. Some of us have places to be!” Red lashed out and hit something soft.

Purple hissed and wiggled out of the way, but didn’t loosen his grip. “No kidding, genius. Why’d you think I was headed to Devastis in the first place?”

 _Oh, you’ve_ got _to be kidding._

He’d gotten the summons too. This festering pukestain had the nerve to get a summons for Invader training—THE most prestigious title in the Irken military— **_and_ ** had the total gall to be the same height as him? 

Red snarled and lashed out—only to find nobody there and his antenna free.

“Quick question.” Purple leaned over the control panel, his puffy eye squinting in the bright lights of the bridge. “Wasn’t this thing broken before?” He tilted his head towards the light. “I thought the power went out.”

It had.

Red met him at the bloodied and dented control panel. The lit and blinking functional control panel. _How did…_ His antennae perked. “Where’s the moth?”

As one, they turned and followed their path of destruction from Purple’s room to the hall to the bridge to the wall. White fuzz mingled with a green blood trail smearing the gaping hole in the airlock.

The airlock with the cable connecting the rebel ship to _The Lenient_.

HIS _Lenient_.

A foreign body at this very moment was physically touching—or worse, **sitting** —in _The Lenient_. Hacking her beautiful power core. Sapping her energy to jumpstart the scrapheap ship. Shedding disgusting moth dust across her upholstery. Raiding her glorious mini-fridge!

“My baby!” Red bolted for the airlock.

Purple jumped a toppled command chair and followed on his heels. “Aw, spoots!”

To Reds surprise, a sharp scent of panic pulsed and spiked behind him. Antennae straight and flat, Elite Purple’s bare feet slapped the floor in great running leaps. Every breath peppered with little “Spoots, spoots, spoots, oh _spoots_ ” all the way through the connector cable and into _The Lenient_ ’s cockpit.

A waste of energy. Sized for solo flights, _The Lenient_ couldn’t fit two tallers and a Fweezian, but that didn’t stop Purple from trying. His lanky body crawled halfway out the airlock, one hand reaching for Red in vain. “Wait.”

Climbing into his cockpit, Red spared the Elite a simmering glare and turned away. One intruder at a time. His skin shivered in the chill; she’d wasted no time making herself at home and lowered the temperature.

A low growl rumbled in his throat. Red stormed toward the Fweezie filth sitting her filthy body in _his_ chair. Bleeding all over _his_ console while the three working arms redirected _his_ energy feeds and fuel lines. How hard did one have to pull to separate a moth’s head from its shoulders?

More slapping and scrambling behind him. In the corner of Red’s eye, Purple had squeezed most of his body through the airlock. “Irk’s sake—wait!”

Oh, so _now_ he wanted to hold back on his captives? Should’ve thought of that before.

The moth’s antennae perked. She tucked and rolled before Red’s claws reached her. He followed.

Forget the bounty. Forget the fines. Red could get the monies some other way. This alien was leaving his ship. Now. In pieces, if necessary.

The saws of his volt-cutters rose squealing out of his PAK, spitting sparks across the cockpit. They’d sliced through hulls and barricades. He’d never seen what they could do to a soft fleshy body, but it felt like a great day to find out.

The Fweezian bared her nasty needle teeth, unsheathing a knife. Maybe the tip of the broken spear, maybe a new one. Didn’t matter; the cutters could handle both, and she knew it.

Purple squeaked in his throat. “WAIT! Lady Greendown—uh, Harpe! H-hey, can’t we talk about this?”

The Fweezian retreated backward. Flinched when the sparks of Red’s saws burned the fur on her cheeks. “Thou art a knave and a scoundrel, deceitful slave of the Empire!” She took shelter under the command console, sandwiched between the wall and the minifridge. “We’ve nothing to discuss.”

What kind of disgusting coward used an innocent fridge for a body shield? Red bent down to go after her and nearly got his eye poked out by her stupid little knife.

“Come on, I didn’t lie about _every_ thing.” Did this idiot Elite EVER shut up? “Like… um… I really did like those blankets you made! That counts for something, right?” Purple desperately rooted around his PAK for something. What, Red didn’t care to know.

It served as a decent distraction, though. The second the moth’s gaze shifted, Red lunged under the console, snatched her leg, and yanked.

Yelping, the Fweezie flipped over and fluttered her wings. In _The Lenient_ ’s fully functional lights, the flash of scales became an erratic strobe. Blinding, even when Red turned away and shut his eyes.

Didn’t matter. Eyes or no eyes, nobody knew Red’s ship better than Red. The minifridge sat to his right, meaning the secondary glove box was right above him. He punched it open, snatched the loaded blaster inside, and honed in on the quick vibration of Fweezie wings.

She cried out before Red fired a shot. Something thumped hard next to him. The moth’s foot. Coughing, she stumbled and fell.

Red’s vision cleared. Billows of smoke curled through the ship, dark blue and heavy with the scent of citric acid and clove. Purple had set off a smoke bomb.

“Non-lethal methods! Code… whatever!” Through the smoke, Purple’s silhouette tossed a pair of cuffs through the air.

Red’s free hand caught it. The moth struggled to her feet, weakly clawing at him. He grabbed a fistful of delicate wing membrane and kicked her feet out from under her. The second she went down, he caught her wrist and snapped on the cuff.

Instantly, mechanical cables snaked out to become a set of six, one to capture each limb.

Red blinked away the last of blinding effects and stood to consider the bound and subdued Fweezian at his feet. He prodded the intricate filigree patterns in her wing with the toe of his boot. “Greendown, huh? As in the royal Greendowns?” He raised an eyebrow at Purple’s nod. “Huh. Thought we slaughtered all of those last century.”

“We did, sorta,” Purple said, coming up from behind. “But nobility’s got all these little derivatives and stuff. Offspring of the cousin of a bastard duke’s uncle’s mistress’s nurse or whatever, I dunno. Still counts, I guess.”

“Sounds stupid and complicated.”

“It is.”

“No wonder they’re dead.” The Greendown had either gone unconscious or incapacitated from the smoke bomb. Red nudged her cheek with his boot. Unconscious. “Wait… you had those bombs this entire time?”

Purple looked up from his gauntlet. “Sure I did.”

“Why didn’t you use that in the FIRST place?!”

He gave a great big roll of his eyes. “Because I didn’t think of it. Duh.” Cramped inside _The Lenient_ ’s cockpit, Purple knelt on the floor, one elbow propped on the minifridge. He gestured to the scuffle’s debris. “What was all that about, anyway? We both had her; she wasn’t going anywhere. Even if she did, we just would’ve gone with her.”

“She was in my ship,” Red told him.

“…so?”

Red reset the thermostat while he took damage assessment for his beloved _Lenient_. Boot prints and wing scales and bloodstains. Scuffed minifridge. Annoying, but easily fixed. “So my ship is _mine_ . She belongs to _me_.”

Elite Purple tilted his head, cocked his eyebrow at him, then shrugged. Figure an Infiltrator not to understand the value of a good ship; they spent all their time leeching off everyone else’s.

With the Fweezian lying incapacitated and more room to roam, Purple stalked about Red’s cabin, taking in the surroundings. The holographic star map slowly rotated alongside a flightpath the moth had begun to reroute before being interrupted. Muted in the screen above it, The Announcer silently counted down the _Top Twenty Forbidden Snacks Of All Time_ , in order from least to most delicious.

“Not bad,” he said, “but I’ve seen nicer. Ooh, nice cupholder though! Is this custom made?” Purple ignored Red’s irritated huff. “You know, you never gave me your name, Elite…” He spotted the I.D. plaque engraved above the steering stick. “…Red.”

“You didn’t request it, and it wasn’t important.” Not that Red was required to release his identification to anyone besides superior officers in the first place.

Red wiped the moth dust off his suit and rose to dump the Fweezie into her own ship—and Purple too, while he was at it. Let him find his own way to Devastis. Out of the corner of his eye, he glanced at stars drifting by the window. He slowed to a stop.

Why were the stars drifting?

At the same time, Purple appeared over his shoulder. “Are we moving?”

 _The Lenient_ chirped as if in response. A thin scroll of yellow text ran along the bottom of the console: _ENERGY TRANSFERAL: 100% COMPLETION_.

Together, they stared out at a rogue Fweezian ship, fully powered and operational. Without a pilot.

And slowly drifting down to Devastis.

 _The Lenient_ jerked violently. Red’s broken foot collapsed under him, and he fell backwards into Purple.

Drifting? Make that falling. Fast. Very fast.

“Disconnect! _Lenient_ , disconnect from unauthorized ship immediately!”

 _INSUFFICIENT POWER. PLEASE DISCONNECT MANUALLY._ A second message flashed above it in stark black and red. _WARNING: INCOMING PLANET AHEAD._

“Thanks, I noticed. You—move.” Shoving the useless Irken lump away from the chair, Red hopped into his rightful place and gripped the steering stick.

Nebulas and satellites and stars and ships smeared in a blur. Temperature control hummed as the falling ship dragged the tethered _Lenient_ into Devastis’ atmosphere.

The Elite behind him dug his claws into the back of Red’s chair. “What are you doing? You can’t rip us off; we’ll just get sucked out of the air—”

“Not ripping us off.”

Devastis streaked by the windshield in a whirling splotch of browns and greens, broken by the occasional landmark. There went the crest of the Arena Spire. Combat hubs. Firing ranges. The Punishment Cube.

Red axed _Lenient_ ’s thrusters and eased her into cruising speeds. Just enough to stay ahead of the crashing ship and give the connector hose some slack. “I just need to keep her in the air in the meantime until—”

_SMASH!_

Oof, that sounded expensive.

_CRACK._

That, too.

They wrenched backward as the hose went taut. The rogue ship must have finally collided.

 _The Lenient_ eased into a hover and gently landed atop the insurgent ship’s scorched and battered hull.

None of those voices outside sounded very happy.

The ship’s entry hatch eased open. Slowly, Red poked his head out and looked around.

Over two-hundred thousand Irken Elite soldiers stared back at them, a line of stunned commanding officers at the forefront. In the thick of the crowd, a smaller Irken stood on tiptoe to stare. Tenn caught Red’s eye and waved at him.

Unsure what else to do, Red waved back.

Light poured through the jagged crater in what had once been a roof. They’d crashed right into the orientation hall.

Purple dusted a cloud of rubble off his shoulder and checked his gauntlet. “Ha! Five minutes early.” He snickered and elbowed Red in the ribs. “See? Toldja we wouldn’t be late.”


	2. A Garbage Partnership Made of Garbage With a Garbage Engine and Wings Made of Dookie and Also Garbage

**[Devastis. CYCLE 17. Era 24. Training Year 1]**

Red hadn’t been worried at all, not really. Not at first. These things happened, right?

Any smeet five minutes out of activation imploded a turbine or five before they’d even gotten a whiff of surface air. It was nature. You couldn’t stop nature, right? Even in a nigh-perfect species, the odd mistake popped up now and then, and as a species engineered and fine-tuned in the art of destruction, those mistakes blossomed spectacularly. Never a cherry bomb, always a nuke.

With that in mind, it didn’t surprise Red that this particular error claimed a casualty or twenty: multiple firing ranges leveled or incapacitated, four shattered statues (five, counting the in-progress monument to Tallest Miyuki’s victory of the Snack Wars), an obliterated orientation hall, the Arena Spire’s 16th, 18th, and 19th floors completely gutted (with multiple breakouts), and at least five snack bars closed for the rest of the week. Oh, and probably some organic casualties too, but nobody’d given a readout for those. 

Still, it could’ve been a lot worse. Without Red’s expert piloting skills, both ships would’ve tumbled through the training facility instead of scalping a couple of spires. The Prime Commanders would understand, right? Right. Besides, none of this was Red’s fault anyway. The Prime Commanders were wise and just and would surely realize that it’d been Purple’s slip-ups that caused this whole mess. 

Therefore, Red wasn’t worried because he had nothing to worry about.

The elevator doors hissed open. _FLOOR 22-B. PLEASE EXIT THROUGH THE REAR DOORS. THIS ELEVATOR WILL SELF-DESTRUCT IN 30 SECONDS._

Not until he’d realized the Commanders were meeting them privately.

Red stepped out slowly as his eyes adjusted to the great mouth of darkness before him. If he squinted, he could barely make out the sloped walls and the fat ropes of coil and wire glinting in the elevator lights before the door closed. A lonely runway bottlenecked through the dim chamber, backlit in a sickly yellow-green glow. It could’ve hung two or two hundred feet in the air for all he knew. An illuminated platform hovered at the end of their path, a tiny bright circle of doom framed by the long silhouettes of the Prime Commanders of Devastis.

He searched for eyes watching from the shadows or the telltale recording light of a camera. Some sign of bloodthirsty rubbernecks eager for a show. Nothing like a good old-fashioned public flogging to boost morale, and nobody could resist the simple joys of watching someone fall flat on their face. And how often did someone get to watch tallers get their heads bitten off? This should’ve been the show of the decade. If not a spectacle for the masses, then at least a special presentation for the six-footers who’d aced their finals.

But no. As far as Red could tell, the chamber housed five Irkens and five alone: the Prime Commanders and the accused. Completely private.

The clank of Red’s damaged boot echoed along the metal runway as the humid underground air rustled through his tattered uniform. Ugh, last time he’d been this deep underground he’d still had an egg tooth. Resemblances aside, this was not a smeetery and this was no time to shmoop. Eyes forward, back straight, and head held high, Red marched forward.

Elite Purple strolled alongside him with his hands in his pockets, glancing at the lights lining the walkway now and then. He’d been quiet the whole trip here—stewing in his own guilt and shame, no doubt. They’d probably throw him to The Digestor.

But in that case, why summon both of them if they didn’t plan to punish both at once? Their sentence had to be something so horrible, so unspeakable it couldn’t be seen by Irken eyes. Far worse than your average skin-flaying or pummeling. Maybe even worse than being eaten alive.

Perhaps Purple had already realized it. The terror must have been eating him alive. If he didn’t completely deserve it, Red might have felt an inch of sympathy for him.

Slowly, Purple raised his head to where the ceiling should have been and rubbed the back of his neck. “Hey,” he whispered, “you think they’re still gonna have those little parfaits at the snack bar by the time we’re done with this?” He pointed at the lights moving beneath their boots. “On Foodcourtia the green lights mean it’s custard and pastry day but I dunno if that’s the same everywhere or not. What were the snack codes where you were stationed? Fleet still had ground stations, right?”

Red stared at him. “Seriously?”

“Hm. Yeah, dumb question. You need to dock ships somewhere, of course there’s ground stations. This is a much bigger military hub though, so they might not need to ration snacks into special days. Maybe they have pastries all the time. I bet—” Purple paused to glance back at the muffled elevator explosion behind them, shrugged, and kept moving. “I bet they’re all made on location, too! Have you ever had a parfait right off the line?” Purple’s eyes got round and glossy. “Or _flan_? Ohhh, it’s been forever since I’ve had a good—”

“They’re probably not serving anything after the snack bars got smashed to bits. How are you even thinking of snacks right now?” Red gestured at the ominous black void of punishment surrounding them and the towering pillars of judgment ahead.

Purple blinked at said pillars of judgment—namely the especially judgey one in the center—and rolled his shoulders in a languid little shrug. Trace scents of marinara still clung to him, mingling with the stink of his little off-worlder slumber party. Disgusting.

Red’s lip curled in a sneer. “Didn’t you already stuff your gullet with those pizza rolls?”

“That was almost two hours ago, and I barely got to eat any because SOMEbody popped into my ship and knocked ’em all over the dirty dirty floor.” Purple swept in closer, picking up speed to match Red’s brisk march. He tilted his head, waving his antennae too close for polite society. “What’s eating you, anyway? _You’re_ not the one who got his first solo mission all gunked up by some random gunk pilot who can’t check his messages.”

Red huffed and smacked Purple’s antennae out of his face. This was a disciplinary hearing; they weren’t even supposed to be talking right now.

Not that Purple seemed to care. “Nothing even happened to your ship besides a scratch or ten.”

“ONLY—” Red flinched at the echo of his own voice and dialed it to a whisper. " _Only_ a scratch or _ten_? Yeah, no. Try sixty-seven and a half scratches, plus the battered hull, the bent fin, all that moth dust in the upholstery…”

He hissed out a long breath. One disaster at a time. Get out of this in one piece, fix the ship later. Thinking of his poor _Lenient_ got Red’s spooch all twisty inside, anyway. Forget the debt he already owed paying her off; the cost of getting her back to optimal shape had to be in the ten-thousands.

What else could he have expected, letting this sloggy Infiltrator within ten yards of _The Lenient_? The second Red got out of here, his ship was going on the list for security upgrades. One of those new shield barriers with DNA clearance.

…IF he got out of here. The last time Red had caused this kind of collateral damage, he’d led his fleet through a lava asteroid belt. Even then, he’d only lost rations for a few months. Red’s antennae drooped. He should’ve snagged one of those pizza rolls when he had the chance. Might be a while before he legally ate anything else.

Purple’s nosy antenna wiggled back into Red’s line of sight, flicking just out of swatting range. “How come you smell like someone sentenced to drone duty?”

Now that he’d mentioned it, Red couldn’t detect any alarm or fear pheromones in the air besides his own. Not even a gentle pulse of dread. “Why don’t you?”

Ahead, the line of Commanders turned to watch their approach, growing larger and larger by the footstep. One narrowed their eyes at him, glowing with menace in the dark.

“And keep your voice down, they’re gonna hear you.”

“Why would I?” Purple asked with absolutely zero effort to lower his voice at all. He smiled with the balmy interest of someone watching the whole affair from the safety of their skybox and munching nachos. Jerk.

At least he had the sense to straighten up when they approached the semicircle of Prime Commanders. Purple offered a low antennae dip in salute. That stupid smile hadn’t waned an inch. Either he had the best poker face in the Empire or he really was the stupidest Irken Red met in his life (and he’d met a lot of stupid Irkens).

Red could only hope it wouldn’t get them both killed. Practically on tiptoe, he saluted in turn. “Greetings, my Commanders. Please let me be the first to say what a supreme honor it is to be summoned to the mightiest of military training facilities and to even be considered for the Invasion training program.” Red turned to the Irken on the left. “And I look forward to training under your command again, Prime Commander Poki.”

Poki clicked her tongue. The platform lights really highlighted those bags under her eyes. “That’s one of us, at least.” She crossed her arms with a scowl to curdle a silo of milkbars. “Couldn’t even wait until after orientation to kickstart a brand new disaster, could you Elites?”

Purple’s gaze skimmed Poki and the two officers at her side. He offered them a wry little shrug. “Heh, my old commander always said I had initiative.”

Red stiffened. _Collective keep me, he’s gonna get me splattered on the wall._

“Initiative. That’s what you choose to call it?” Prime Commander Nord stepped from his place in the center, buggy green eyes narrowed. “Sixteen-hundred million monies in collateral damage including eighty-six Irken casualties, forty-four firing ranges razed to the concrete, The Spire’s midsection out of commission, a Punishment Cube cracked to the base, three years— _three years minimum_ —of repairs, and fifteen snack bars, including the brand new Orientation Hall location, obliterated and unusable for the next month.” His voice rumbled calm and treacherous. “You call that taking initiative, Elites?”

Beside him, Commander Whatevs dabbed her eyes with a handkerchief. “Oh, that poor snack bar…”

“And nobody mourns the loss of that snack bar more than I do, believe me, but…” Red shot a nasty glare at his fellow Elite. It was a garbage argument with a garbage engine and wings made of dookie and also garbage, but too late to ditch it now. “…yes. Yes, I do. The uh… particulars of the situation called for initiative and drastic action. So that’s what I did.”

Commander Poki’s stare simmered but she made no move to contradict him. She’d let him get this far without dropkicking him into the incinerator, so…

“A hostile foreign species tried to commandeer an Irken military Spittle Runner in Devastis airspace. I admit I couldn’t avoid all possible damage but if _I_ hadn’t piloted the Spit with the alien vessel attached, both would have crashed in freefall without leveling out at all.”

Purple quirked an eyebrow at him.

Red ignored it. “The only alternative option, Commanders, meant allowing the enemy vessel to drag both ships through Devastis and resulting in even greater damage. Nobody wants that, right? Less damage is better than more damage.”

“No damage is better than less damage,” Nord said.

Commander Whatevs considered Red’s damaged boot and the tattered silk robes hanging from Purple’s shoulders. She considered it for an uncomfortably long time.

Not for the first time, Red wished they could’ve received their new uniforms first. He grabbed his torn charred sleeve before it slipped onto the floor. At least the boot matched the rest of him now.

Whatevs stroked her chin. “Mm-hmm. And an Irken Fleetclass Spittle Runner was attached to a Fweezian civilian barge because…?”

“Oh! Well, that’s because Elite Red decided he had the clearance to compromise an ongoing Elite Infiltration of rebellious occupant hostiles without any authorization or warning whatsoever.” Purple bounced on his heels with a grin to crush cinderblocks. “ _I_ , Commanders, immediately rerouted the barge’s flight pattern as soon as I got my summons. Check the records and you’ll see the ship was already marked Irken property and cleared for landing, by the way. I was en route to crack Devastis territory when—ow!”

Red’s palm jammed into Purple’s eye, shoving him aside. “Pardon the interruption, Commanders.” He kept his eyes on Poki. If Purple stayed in eyesight one second longer Red couldn’t stop himself from knocking the jaw off his stupid smug face. “Isn’t it military protocol to _clearly and properly_ alert allied vessels upon appearance instead of shoveling Instant Fruit into their ugly throats?”

“Isn’t it also protocol to check someone’s stupid messages so they don’t miss that alert in the first place?” Purple shot back.

“Alerts are clear they’re alerts and not random Foodcourtian junk mail.”

Purple’s voice pinched into a tight little squeak. “And fleet pilots don’t fly around boarding random ships in the solar system!”

“No, they don’t,” said Commander Poki. “And sub-commanders also don’t tend to ignore _direct orders_ to beeline a new assignment without diversions.” Her cold gaze swung to Purple. “Commander Whatevs, remind me: shouldn’t an Infiltrator already have a hostile vessel secured well _before_ it comes in range of the Irken military’s most valuable location and potentially compromises the entire planet?”

Whatevs skimmed her data readout. “I’m actually more curious to know why a six-month mission took nearly two years. Elite, you should have completed long before now.”

Red huffed under his breath. _Probably because he’d rather sleep in his nest snacking and being waited on by gullible Screwheads._

“Uhh…” Elite Purple’s smile fell a few centimeters. It finally seemed to hit him that he might actually be in trouble.

Normally this would’ve been time for Red to sit back and gloat at the carnage, but in this case, the same laser had them both in its sights. Every argument in Red’s arsenal about Purple’s incompetence traced back to highlight his own. (Not that Red had been incompetent, but in the heat of the moment a grumpy commander might read it that way.) Assigning blame—justified or not—would only turn into back-and-forths and more questions. Questions they’d both rather avoid.

Like the ships that had brought them here, their testimonies and their fates were tethered to each other. If one crashed, they both crashed.

Red and Purple exchanged glances.

But if they could keep the same speed and altitude, if they flew _together_ , maybe they could land this thing without any fires. Or at least without any 4th degree burns.

Without a word, they both found the answer. Purple hopped on it first. “The Fweezian, Commanders. I locked down the others early on, but the moth suspected me from the start. It took all of those six months just to gain her trust, and even then she kept an eye on me for the rest of the voyage. She was also the only one with real battle training and experience.”

Poki tapped a skeptical claw on her gauntlet. “You’re telling me an Elite-class Infiltrator couldn’t subdue one little pacifist moth?”

_Sure didn’t stab like a pacifist._ Red rubbed his chest. Whenever he breathed too hard he could still feel a slight chill of venom.

“Without compromising the mission? No. Not without serious bodily damage to the Fweezian. I had orders from the Almighty Tallest herself to deliver Greendown alive and as intact as possible.” Purple flicked an antenna and shot Red a dry look.

Red blinked back innocently. Hey, five out of six arms was still pretty intact. That arm he’d shot off still existed, it just got relocated a little. “I found the insurgents’ ship through leaked battle plans in the broadcast signals, and the audio indicated at least one moth aboard. It sounded suspicious and I had no time to relay a superior, so I figured I’d check in to be safe.”

“Personally?” Nord said.

“I didn’t want to give away my position and we were practically on top of each other anyway. Figured it’d be a quick in-and-out, but when I detected an Irken signal aboard I presumed the worst. Upon boarding, I discovered the Fweezian and my fellow Elite here in a stalemate.” He’d entered dangerous territory; their stories had to synch perfectly from here on out. Red didn’t dare tear his eyes from the Commanders for a moment. “Saving my ally was the best option at the time, especially considering that, again, they sat right outside Devastis territory.” After quick consideration, he added, “Also, I’m pretty sure threats of planetary and species-wide security _technically_ override my original orders anyway, so…”

Poki exchanged glances with her fellow Commanders. “Is this true, Elite Purple?”

Wrinkling his face a bit, Purple clarified, “I didn’t need _saving_ , but yes. I think Greendown figured it out by the time we entered Devastis’ orbit. When Elite Red showed up she knew it couldn’t be a coincidence, not with the ship sabotage on top of it. Namely, the disabled warp. Dunno if she knew about the leaked signals, but it wouldn’t surprise me. An Irken ship showing up out of nowhere and killing the power just confirmed what she knew, and from there…” He gestured to their torn and tattered clothing. “Well, we had a little situation.”

It felt like they’d leveled out. Flying nice and stable. Good. Not great, but good. Now to bring it in.

“The filthy coward sicced her crew on us and made a break for the connected _Lenient_. No doubt it was her intent to pirate the ship back to her allies and reverse engineer Irken equipment.” _And touch all my stuff on the way there_. Red would be sweeping dust off the upholstery for months. “That or to turn _The Lenient’s_ weaponry against Devastis itself.”

“Elite, don’t insult us.” Commander Whatevs—overseer of planetary security if Red remembered right—dismissed him with a scoff. “One Spittle Runner’s cannons couldn’t crack our shields if it blitzed all week. Our planetary outposts would’ve caught the biosignature before the moth even broke the atmosphere.”

“The noble-ranked Fweezian showed plenty of cunning, suspicion, and cowardice, but Commanders, nobody called her smart.” Red dared a smile with his little joke.

Poki rolled her eyes, but Nord held back a smile. Whatevs actually snickered.

Purple cleared his throat into his glove. “All due respect, neither of us went against orders. I’d already acted under orders best as I could and redirected the ship to a secure docking station. As for Red…” Their eyes met. Purple grinned. “You said it yourself, Commander Poki: he’s a fleet pilot. He was told to ignore his current mission, and this had nothing to do with that mission. Just doing his duty, right?”

“Right.” Red hadn’t expected that boost but he wasn’t about to question it. “I know the Spire’s seen better days but if we hadn’t acted—”

“—there might not be a Spire left to fix,” Purple finished.

Commander Poki stroked her chin, nodding to herself. “I see. You weighed the risks and overstepped your bounds for the good of the Empire.”

They nodded together. “Yes, ma’am.”

“Sounds like this incident was a team effort.” Poki craned her neck towards Whatevs. “That’s interesting, isn’t it?”

“Oh yes, Poki.” Something about Whatevs’ gently amused tone turned Red’s spooch. “Irkens learning to rely on each other just like in basic training. Why, it’s inspiring in its own way.”

“The others in training could learn a lot from them.” And now Nord was in on it too.

Slowly, Poki approached. At close range, her chin perched inches above the Elites’ heads. The hum of the hovering platform echoed through the underground chamber.

“Well!” She grinned.

In all the years he’d served in the fleet, Red had never seen Poki smile. Not so much as a cruel smirk, not even that time a drone from accounting fell into the trash compactor.

_It didn’t work. It didn’t work, she didn’t buy it, and now she’s gonna flay me alive and leave me in the sun for the worms and squeakbeetles._

Her antennae pricked cheerily. “Since you two work so well together, you wouldn’t mind a little more teamwork time, would you?”

“Uh.” Red turned to Purple.

Purple scratched the back of his neck, glancing from Commander to Commander and back to Red. “Um, I… I guess not—”

“Great to hear.” On Poki’s signal, a shackle snapped around Red’s leg. A thin plasma ring glowed on the rim of his boot.

Purple jumped with a yelp as a second shackle clamped over his bare ankle. “That thing’s freezing!” Served him right for slogging around barefoot like some backwater Vortian in the first place.

Upon closer inspection, the shackle resembled the tether rings Red had seen the Wardens use for slaves and prisoners on work leave. Not a one-to-one match (this skintight model was sleek and discreet, unnoticeable aside from the glow) but the basic build seemed about the same. Designed for long-range control, the ring allowed free movement within a designated area, so long as the sap stayed in range of their contact point. Move beyond that point and… ow. The one guy Red had seen try to run for it returned as a twitching knot of charred meat. In three separate sections.

He’d never heard of tether rings being used on Irkens before, but Red never paid much attention to the finer details of prisoner wrangling either. But why bother tethering someone in training in the first place? It wasn’t like they were fleeing the planet anytime soon.

An awful idea slithered in the pit of Red’s guts: nobody had actually guaranteed he’d even be _allowed_ into Invader training at all. Maybe their next stop would be demotion or… He shook his head. No. No, if it were anything that bad, Poki would’ve led with it.

Prime Commander Nord cleared his throat. “Irken Elite Red and Irken Elite Purple, you are hereby sentenced to a tethering.”

Purple’s face crinkled in a squint as he silently mouthed the sentence back to himself. He searched Red for an answer, but Red stared back equally lost.

_Tethered to what?_

There should have been a matching contact point somewhere. A mounted pole or a handheld control panel or something. Red looked at his shackle again: a ring of purple light pulsing in time with his heartbeat. He looked at Purple’s. Same thing, except for the color. Purple’s ring glowed bright red.

Spoots. “Are… are we tethered to _each other_?”

Commander Poki’s little smile returned. “You are to both keep within seven feet of each other at all times. From this moment until the end of the year.”

Red struggled to keep his volume respectable. The last thing he needed was an insubordination charge. “But the year just started!”

The weight of the sentence piled up by the second. A year. Irk save him, a full four hund—wait, the new year started last week—a full three hundred and ninety-two days stuck with this scuzzsack. Not only on missions but _everywhere_. In lessons and sparring and training sims. In the hallways and snacktimes and off-times and study sessions and if he got a nap pass he’d probably have to share a couch and Red wouldn’t have an ounce of peace and it wasn’t fair because this was Purple’s stupid ugly stupid fault in the first stupid place and… and why wasn’t Purple more upset about this?

In fact, Purple seemed as if he hadn’t heard the sentence at all. He put his hands in his robe pockets and rocked back on his bare heels like someone with better places to be. Head angled down, his violet eyes fixed upon the Commanders in a lazy half-lid stare. When Poki frowned at him, that stare didn’t break. “Sooooo, is there anything else or…?”

Their gauntlets beeped with a new downloaded message.

“Just one,” Poki told them. “Your invoice. Damage repayments.”

Against his better judgment, Red checked the numbers. Bad idea. He closed his messages with a wince. So much for paying off _The Lenient_ any time this cycle. “Are we sharing this part, too?”

Poki nodded. “Always said you were smarter than you looked. Split it among yourselves; don’t care how.” Her eyes narrowed. “Is that alright with you, Elite?”

Below her, Purple skimmed through the rest of his recent messages. One antenna twitched while he tapped through a string of ads. “Fine with me, ma’am.”

Red edged away from him just in case. Maybe if he got lucky Poki’d blast Purple’s head off his shoulders right here and now. Paying all that debt on his own would be worth it if it meant skipping a year tethered to this walking death wish.

Every soldier had contempt for their superior officers now and then (or always) but for Irk’s sake, you didn’t actually _show_ it. It had been no mistake either, judging by the gleam in that nasty purple eye. Commander Poki had kicked soldiers down three flights of escalators for less.

“Thank you, Commanders.” Red stepped forward and saluted, ignoring the muffled snicker behind him. “Is there anything else you need to share with us?”

“Orientation’s in an hour. Get out of my sight until then.” Poki shook her head at Purple’s robe and sighed the sigh of someone who hadn’t slept ten dozen cycles. “And change.”

Red glared at the label inside the collar of his new uniform. He glared at the uniform Purple was currently slipping into. “Check it again.”

A wave of groans traveled down the line behind him.

“Hey, shut up!” It wasn’t Red’s fault the idiot couldn’t measure right.

The garment drone slumped behind his desk and sighed into the mic. “Sir, I’ve already taken it eight times.” He pinched his brow as if Red was the one wasting everyone’s time. Lot of nerve for a drone. “I ran you through the system, I checked the reference sheets, I even used that archaic measuring tape. I assure you those are the correct measurements.”

“Take it nine times, then! I know that can’t be right.”

Behind him, Purple finished snapping himself into the new armor. “Yeah, what if he grew a whole half-centimeter while he was busy complaining like a big old whiny complainey complainer baby who complains all the time?” He tried some stretches and high kicks, admiring himself in the wall-length mirror. “Ooh, it’s roomy. And check out this neat little flappy thing in the back.”

“Come on, man,” the drone begged. “There’s a line back there.”

Red smacked both palms on the desktop, leaning over the edge. “Yeah, and whose fault is that, smart guy? If you knew how to do your job—”

“Listen, even if you did grow in the last…” The garment drone checked the clock. “…fifteen minutes, these things are based on average body height; there’s only like four versions of these things. It’d fit the same either way because the polymer adjusts with the body and grows with… oh, fine.”

“Good.”

“But this is the last time.” The measurement laser scanned Red from head to foot. “Six feet, nine inches, two-point fifty-three centimeters.” Before he got chewed out a ninth time, the drone rescanned Purple too. (Though he had to try a couple of times with the way Purple high-kicked and pirouetted around the dressing hub.) “Six feet, nine inches, two-point fifty-three centimeters.”

The drone backed away from the counter and out of punting range. “I’m not measuring the antennae.” Snot.

Red snatched his uniform and stomped into a corner to suit up as far away from these jerks as possible. Which, in the confines of Advent Hub B, wasn’t very far at all. It had been intended as an area to prep mission takeoffs and assignments for individual squads and cells, not hold a full third of Invader recruits, but that’s what came of smashing through orientation halls. It could have been worse. Apparently, one of the other sections had to prep and meet in the Waste Disposal Hull F. At least this place had benches.

Without looking, Red sensed all the little pairs of eyes upon him and the telltale click of boots shyly trailing behind. Even in the middle of one of Irk’s greatest events of the season, nobody had anything better to do than sniff for gossip. They’d been tailing him for a while now. Both him and Purple. They’d probably taper off once they received their actual assignments or after one came too close and Red threw them into a ceiling fan. Whichever came first.

He focused on the clean iron curves of the wall in his corner of the room, a smooth black arc of metal that stretched up to the domed roof. Squiggles of moonlight cracked through the clouds above them, muted and dull through the blastproof glass. Red only found a few stray scuffs and claw marks in the walls; they must’ve refurbed the place recently. He concentrated on wondering who’d left the bite marks in the bench beside him and not on the murmuring just out of eyesight.

The prickling warmth buzzing around his ankle proved harder to ignore. It felt like a leg full of radio static—annoying, rough, kind of itchy, but tolerable. After Red finished climbing into his bodysuit, that buzz became a throb. By the time he snapped on the last piece of armor—actually not a bad look and that flappy thing _was_ pretty sweet—the throb had built into a sharp sting.

Thousands of invisible barbs pulsed through skin and tissue, deep into the bone. Warning pulses. Red only stood about six feet away from Purple, but apparently, he’d stood there for too long. He rubbed the boot covering the tether ring, sighed, and made his way back.

Something touched his boot. “Uh.” A stubby Elite with a flat head blinked up at him expectantly.

Red glared and nudged the short guy out of the way with the heel of his new boot. He had enough to worry about, thanks.

He found Purple lounging in the center of the room, sprawled out on his side to hog the whole bench, and munching an ice cream taco. The room’s harsh spotlights gave his skin a sallow sheen. Paired with the same basic grey uniform, a passerby could barely tell the difference between them aside from eye color and scent. And soon, not even scent—a few months in each other’s company would take care of that. Either they’d both come out smelling like Devastis or they’d rub off on each other and Red would have to get used to smelling like a juice bar until graduation. “Took you long enough. You sure it fits this time? Don’t need a tenth measurement with that long ropey thing?”

Some squirrely looking shrimp—a Battalion transfer, from the smell of him—sat on the tiny corner of the bench unoccupied by Purple’s legs. He held a wrapper and a small corner of ice cream taco, watching Red’s approach.

“I like being precise. You, move.” Red plucked the little Irken off so he could set his foot on the bench. “They never get the measurements completely right. If I’m stuck with this thing for a whole cycle, it better fit.”

“Technically,” said the little guy with the taco wrapper, “it’s eleven years, so it’s a cycle and four—”

“Hey, where’d you get an ice cream taco anyway?” Red glanced around the room as if he’d find a secret snack machine stowed behind the boot racks.

“Oh, this?” Flurries of chocolate scattered across the floor when Purple talked. “My little buddy Flarb got it for us to share, right Flarb?”

The supposed “little buddy” didn’t seem too sure about that, but he didn’t argue. “Er, Larb, actually. I think I’m part of your—”

“If you got it to share, where’s my half?” Red squinted at the waffle cone in Larb’s hand. “That better not be it.”

Purple rolled on his stomach, waving both feet in the air behind him. “No, that’s _Lart’s_ half. _You_ don’t get one because you didn’t wanna listen when I asked if you wanted some.”

“Asked when?”

“When you were busy with the drone, being a smeetysmeet about being the same height as me. You snooze you lose, shuttlebug. Isn’t that right, Flart?”

Larb fiddled with his antenna, trying not to look either Elite in the eye. “I don’t really want to get into this; I just wanted to know which one of you I’m supposed to—”

“Right!” Purple slapped Larb hard on the shoulder. “Farb here knows what it’s about.”

Before Red could point out that neither he nor anyone else gave half a worm’s egg about what Larb thought, a burst of movement at the front of the room caught his attention. Sounded like the beginning of a scuffle.

Somebody cried out in an indignant squeak. A stack of uniforms toppled as piercing microphone feedback shrieked through the hub. The garment drone huddled at the corner of his desk, clutching his bent antenna in the shadow of a taller Elite. A much taller Elite.

Immediately, Red recognized him. Everyone did. Towering over waves and clusters of little heads and shoulders, the tallest Irken in the hub was kind of hard to miss. He’d been watching Red and Purple from the back of the line since he arrived. The guy had a casual bulk—not the bulging mass of a hardened ground soldier, but still more than the average Irken. Red wondered where he’d transferred from. Looked too mean for a Guard, too dumb for a Slaver, and honestly, too tall for both. He smelled like a fueling station and walked like someone who’d never had to run.

The desk creaked under his weight as the Elite leaned over it, one arm dangling over the edge. “Beg your pardon, pal, I couldn’t hear you the first time. It’s so loud in here, you understand.” He snatched the drone by the skull and lifted him up to eye level. “ _What_ height did you say this one’s for?” The Elite casually glanced at Red and Purple over his shoulder, slowly blinking his bright yellow eyes.

“It’s a sev—” The garment drone squeaked at the claws sinking deeper into his flesh. “SIZE SEVEN POINT FOUR, SIR.”

The huge Elite preened with enough smug to choke a Vortian senator twice over. “Yeah, that sounds about right.”

Purple yawned and licked the last of the ice cream off his fingertips. “Like I said. Dumb to make such a big deal over uniforms.”

“Seriously,” Red scoffed. “We’ve all got the same one.” He eyed the stunted rainbow of shoulder stripes milling around them. “Except, you know, for the little numbers and stripey things.”

“That’s the squad identification,” piped up someone else. Not Larb and not Tenn, who’d come up beside them during that fuss with the garment drone. But they couldn’t see anybody else it could have come from.

What, were the benches talking now? Red supposed it was possible. Weird, but possible. They could’ve installed little speakers in there for important announcements, but wouldn’t walls or ceiling be better places for that kind of thing?

Purple propped himself up on his elbow, one antenna swiveling about. He looked to Red, frowning. “Did that bench just talk? Why’d they make a bench that talks? Nobody can even hear it all the way down there.”

“It’s weird, right?” A little gloved hand tapped Red’s knee. He shooed it off.

“Yeah, you’d think they’d put it—”

“In the walls, yeah.”

“No—what? No.” Purple stared as if that had been the dumbest thing anyone ever said. “They already have stuff in the walls. I was gonna say in the snacks. That way the commanders can bug you no matter where you are, even from your stomach.” He squinted suspiciously at Larb’s taco wrapper.

A stubby arm waved under Purple’s chin. Together, Red and Purple followed the arm down to either the shortest Elite they’d ever seen or some kind of mutated space potato with feet.

The arguable potato kicked his heels in an eager salute. He bounced a little when he did it. “Irken Elite Skoodge reporting for duty, sir!” Skoodge tilted his head, glancing back and forth between them. “Or… sirs?”

Behind him, Tenn and Larb exchanged shrugs. The larger knot of smallers pooling around them didn’t seem to have answers either, and they stared up at Red and Purple as if waiting for one. Technically, half the hub still stared at them anyway (the other half just pretended not to), but everyone also kept a respectful distance. Everyone except these guys.

Red leaned down and beckoned Purple closer with a finger. “Is it me, or have these little guys been following us all day?” He hadn’t looked down enough to know for certain, but Tenn had probably been tailing him since they’d arrived. Not that strange for Tenn—she’d always had her fingers in everything—but that didn’t account for the potato or the taco guy.

“I thought _you_ knew,” Purple not-whispered back.

Elite Tenn pursed her lips and blinked very slowly, the way one does after weeks of back-to-back drills or two hours of corralling smeets. Understandable. More than ten minutes around Purple would tire out anyone. “We’re in your squad. 732.” She tapped the neon pink and green stripes on her uniform, the same color as Red’s, Purple’s, and the Irkens gathered around their bench.

Since when did anybody mention working in squads? Red rolled his eyes. “Well yeah, I knew _that_. Obviously. So what do you want?” He raised an eyebrow as their squad drew in tighter. “You want something, right?”

Skoodge raised his hand. “We were all wondering since… um. Since we noticed you guys are the same height and both on the same squad, we were wondering why—”

Larb shoved Skoodge out of the way. “How come we have _two_ tallers in our squad?”

The magic question, apparently. Towards the back of the room, a pink-eyed sub-commander perked her antennae and chewed her gum faster. The obnoxious seven-footer briefly looked up from shining his new boots. If anyone in Advent Hub B wasn’t paying attention before, they were now.

Red crossed his arms over his propped knee and glared down at the potato. “And why exactly do you need to know? What’s the matter, two isn’t good enough for you?”

“Yeah!” added Purple. “You know, most people would be happy getting doubles, but oooh not Skoodge. Skoodge needs a special reason for everything ‘cause he thinks he’s better than everybody. I liked you better when you were a bench.”

Skoodge shrank back from the dirty looks simmering from the rest of the squad. “But Larb’s the one who—”

“Now you’re blaming someone else for your mistake?” Larb shook his head. “That’s messed up, man.”

Tenn nodded. “Seriously unprofessional.”

“It’s insubordinate, too.” Purple craned his neck backwards. “Hey Red, what’s the height minimum for a Class 3 information request?”

“Pretty sure it’s five foot five,” Red told him. “Is our curious squadmate five foot five, Purple?”

“No. No, he’s not. I heard the clothes drone over there read him as four foot something.”

Elite Larb chuckled and gave Purple’s elbow a friendly jab. “Ha, more like four foot nothing, amirite?”

“Heh.” A brittle smile slowly cracked across Purple’s face. “Yeahhh, sure. Never touch me again, okay?”

Larb jumped back with a wink and shot double-handed finger guns. “Ha, you got it, sir!”

“Actually.” The seven-foot Elite cut through the crowd of smallers. Waves of green bodies rippled, scattered, and broke apart against his passing bulk. His squad flanked him from a polite distance, heads and antennae tilted curiously. “I think the short guy had a fair question.” He turned to the rest of the hub. “Don’t you?”

The rest of the hub didn’t disagree.

Red’s own squad massed together and shied behind their sub-commanders’ bench as they watched the taller Elite’s approach. A blink-and-you’ll-miss-it frown flashed across Purple’s face. He growled low in his chest, so soft Red barely heard it. Felt it, though.

The Elite loomed overhead, staring with eyes too big for his face and the color of stale nachos. “So what’s with…” He gestured vaguely to the both of them: this pair of tall Elites sharing a bench and practically sitting on top of each other. “Ya know, all of… **_this_**? If you’re on the same squad, are you some kinda special partners or what?”

Curling his tethered leg under him, Purple smiled and nodded. “Yes.”

At the same time, Red spat, “No.”

They looked at each other.

Red glared. “ _No—_ ”

“Yes!” Purple chirped louder and a half-second faster. He cupped his chin in his palm and let himself sprawl over every spare inch of the bench. A slow, deliberate spill of arms and legs. Muscles leaned against Red’s hip, braced hard and ready. Not that anyone could tell from that lazy smirk. “No? Well, what do _you_ call people you’re stuck working with all cycle?”

“I'm not a weirdo, so I’d call ‘em teammates.” Red clicked his tongue and dryly added, “Or inmates.”

It was barely even a joke, but Purple laughed at it anyway, bright and loud and infectious as a virus. The kind of laugh that flipped a room and shook it until grins fell out. Tenn snickered to herself. The sound spread from Tenn to Larb, from Larb to their squad and all the other squads in the Hub.

The huge Elite’s chest rumbled with laughter. “Inmates… that’s cute. You guys are adorable. Ah, nice to see you again, little buddy.” He gave Red a pat on the head and started back toward his own squad. “Heh, you just try not to break anymore buildings today.”

_Little buddy_. Red’s eye twitched.

“Again?” Shifting away from the Elite’s clammy gross hand, Red looked him up and down. “Sorry, am I supposed to know you from somewhere?”

The seven-footer stopped and turned. His grin began to fade.

Tenn scuttled in closer. “Sir, you remember Sub-Commander Sponch, right? He ran defense on the Conventia fleet campaign and won last year’s axe toss contest.”

Elite Sub-Commander Sponch nodded proudly.

Red slowly blinked at him. Squinted. Blinked at Tenn. “ _Who?_ ”

“Sponch, sir.” Tenn took a quick second to read the room. She decided to stand closer to Purple. “He broke the soda machine two weeks ago and pilots _The Ostentatious_?”

Red’s eyes lit up in recognition. “Ohh! Right, right, the Ripper with all those tacky mods that can’t fly out of a wet paper sack with the lights on.” He spared Sponch a nod. “Good to see you too.”

That smirk was long gone now. Sponch swung back around. “That’d be her. She’s pretty easy to spot; _Ostentatious_ still has all her mods and parts too, because _her_ pilot knows how to fly and didn’t smash her through the Punishment Cube.”

The crowd drew in. A couple of the looky-loos in the back murmured amongst themselves. Taking bets, maybe.

Purple twitched his antenna. His own smirk had soured somewhere between “little buddy” and “wet paper sack”. He turned to Tenn. “Are all the fleet guys like this?”

Tenn shrugged. “Pretty much. I’d move back if I were you.”

He didn’t, though the warning was enough to get Purple to finally sit up. One hand fiddled with the boot covering the tether ring while he glanced between the tallers and the rest of the room.

“Yeah, well…” Finally with room to sit, Red leaned back on the bench. “That’s what happens when a pilot’s got stuff to do and isn’t busy being a cowardly… not-fly-good coward.” That had sounded a lot better in his head. “A fleet commander oughta know battle scars when he sees ‘em.”

Purple—who nobody had asked to step in and possessed the trash talk skills of a moldy nougat bar—buffed his gauntlet on his new uniform. “I just came from Infiltration and even I know nobody gets scars from sitting around at the base.”

“You’d think a seven-footer could see an enemy vessel coming and do something about it. Apparently, I’ve got to do everything _myself_.” Red shot Purple a flat look.

Purple lobbed it right back. “Lucky for everyone here, some of us give half a damn about planetary security. Otherwise you guys would be up to your eyeballs in moths and Screwheads right now.” He sniffed at an unimpressed Sponch. “You’re welcome.” He pointed at the pink-eyed sub-commander who’d come closer to watch. “You too, Pleeps.”

Without turning his head, Red hissed out of the side of his mouth, “Step off. I can handle this myself.”

“Don’t tell me what to do. You shoulda thought of that before you got us stuck together.” Purple blinked at his squadmates, who blinked back curiously. “Stuck together on the same team, I mean. Darn, it sure is frustrating to share positions with someone the same height as you.”

Sponch held up a hand. “Back up, half-pints. What enemy vessel? You don’t mean that rusty old tub that dragged you in here, do you? Wow, great job keeping us safe from that super scary delivery ship.”

“It’s not like you’re gonna try and sneak into Irken territory with a star bomber.” Red sighed and bobbed his head toward Sponch with a _can-you-believe-this-guy?_ thumb jab. “You’re in Invader training and don’t even know disguises?”

A smaller from one of the other squads spoke up. “I did see the drones dragging offworlders out of the ship earlier today. One of those mushroomy guys from Foodcourtia.”

Others in the crowd confirmed. Three had seen one of the Screwheads. Someone else claimed they’d seen a Fweezie.

“How many were there, sirs?” asked Larb.

Purple shrugged. “About six.”

“—teen,” Red added. “Sixteen.” He traded glances with Purple, who nodded. If they had to ride this story all year, they might as well trick it out as much as possible.

Almost nobody here had height or rank clearance to dig out the truth. Even if they did, without direct access to Commander Whatevs’ files, it’d take months to confirm anything and by then it wouldn’t matter. Everyone would’ve already moved on and/or decided Red’s version sounded cooler (which it did). Nobody here cared about facts, they wanted a story. Might as well give them one.

“Sixteen insurgents from all sorts of planets. Nasty pieces of work too.” Purple patted Red’s shoulder. “We took care of most of them on the way here. I think only a couple made it alive all the way here.”

The sub-commander with pink eyes—Pleeps, someone had called her—crossed her arms. “Shouldn’t there have been more bodies?” She nodded at the second-tallest in her squad. “Sneakyonfoota just came from the morgue and he saw… how many was it?”

“Three fresh ones in cold quarantine,” her second confirmed.

Purple shrugged it off. “Fell out of the airlock. Lost a couple when we came into the atmosphere too, I think?”

“Burned up, yeah. One of the doors probably popped open and broke the seal. I dunno, I didn’t check; we were kinda busy saving your butts.” Red stretched and checked his gauntlet clock. “Sure, I’d have loved to spare The Cube or the Orientation Hall but it’s kinda hard to fight off Fweezian nobles and steer at the same time.”

Light bloomed in the higher reaches of the hub. Above them, a drone dusted off the walkway that ran along the rim of the wall right under the dome ceiling. Shadows moved deep in the throat of the hallway that fed into the hub. Orientation would be starting soon.

A devilish light glinted in Purple’s eye. He'd seen it too. “Hey,” he whispered.

“Way ahead of you.” _As usual._ “It would’ve been awesome if Sponch wanted to come help, but I suppose it wasn’t important enough.”

“Aw come on, be fair, Red. I’m sure our pal Sponch had really important things to do.”

The smallers of Sponch’s squad moved aside. He’d gone quiet all of a sudden. That dangerous sort of calm before a bomb falls. He narrowed his eyes and watched them closely.

Almost. Just a little more. “That’s fair. We happened to be in the right place at the right time, that’s all. And besides…” Red waggled his eyebrows and prepped to spring. “It’s not his fault _The Ostentatious_ is slower than a used Voot.”

Sponch’s claws tore through the bench. Red and Purple jumped back in opposite directions. Which would’ve been a lot more helpful if they had somewhere to jump to. The great bulk of him ate up escape routes quicker than they appeared. Purple sprang away before Sponch’s nails slashed his cheek to ribbons—and ran right into his second hand.

Well, nice knowing him. Red turned and ran for it. A little whir of grey and green dashed in front of him—too fast to dodge—and something tugged his legs out from under him. Red hit the floor hard. The smaller who’d tripped him waved with a nasty smirk as Sponch snatched him by the ankle.

Red instinctively clawed at the floor pulling away from him as Sponch dragged him up. His head swung inches above the concrete—the highest the Elite could pull him. Fingers around his ankle squeezed harder the more he wiggled. “Come on, I just fixed that foot!”

“Don’t wiggle and I don’t need to squeeze.” He squeezed harder anyway. “You guys grab yourselves a couple dozen inches and suddenly forget all your manners, don’t you?”

Purple dangled by the neck in Sponch’s grip. The heel of his boot bumped Red’s chin as he kicked. “What? We were just thinking out loud.”

Sponch chuckled. “Oh. In that case, why don’t I help you learn to think quieter?”

Spotlights blazed above them. The room froze as High Commander Poki glared over the crowd. “ _Elites_.”

Red and Purple dropped to the floor while Sponch and the rest of the Elites scrambled back to their own squads.

“Glad to see our sub-commanders working so well together, but save the carnage for the arena next time, Sponch. It’s easier to clean.” Commander Poki folded her arms behind her back and clicked her tongue. “But seeing as how _nobody here_ is prepared for orientation, I understand how you’d get the two confused.”

Muddled piles of Irkens rushed to untangle themselves into haphazard formation lines. All three squads arranged into triangles: tallest at the top, shortest at the base. From above, they all should’ve formed the symbol of the Irken Empire. Judging by Poki’s expression, Red suspected they more resembled the Empire symbol if it’d been drawn by a blind smeet with no arms. A quick glance behind him confirmed that at least Red’s squad stood in proper formation.

When they’d shaped themselves into something halfway passible, Poki shook her head. “I see you’ve all managed to at least gather yourselves into the appropriate pods and squadrons. Congratulations. You’ve accomplished the bare minimum we ask of Academy smeets.”

Purple gently rotated the antenna Sponch had crushed, trying to straighten it out without touching it. “Are we really getting it twice in the same day? Yeesh, not even snacktime yet.” Pretty optimistic of him to assume anyone got an official snacktime this week at all after all this.

“I didn’t plan on disclosing this, but Almighty Tallest Miyuki was supposed to appear tonight to officially welcome you to Invasion Season. She was supposed to wish you luck, but even the blessing of the Tallest herself wouldn’t help the pathetic scourge I see right now. I’m only glad she doesn’t have to see what cycles of training and trillions of monies and resources have bought the Empire.” She stretched her arm over the crowd. “These are the best of the best in all our Elite fields. Irk’s pinnacle of genetic engineering.” Poki sneered over the railing. “ _These_ are our future Invaders. I’ve seen Planet Jackers with more discipline.”

Several in the crowd visibly flinched at that last part. A small part of Red knew he ought to at least appear ashamed, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. He could barely even hold back his grin.

An electric twinge of anticipation raced through his veins and circuitries and all the bones he’d broken climbing up to this moment. After the Snack Wars and academy training, after crawling under turrets, after grinding out years and years in the training sims, after decades in the endless dark of smeeteries lit only by the promise of faraway stars, after over a century of “soons” and “somedays,” the clock finally shifted. The sky opened up and the suns pooled over the horizon. For the first time in his generation, the great expanse of universe split even wider. A glistening place of conquest and treasures, and all of it for them: the young thousands hungry and beautiful and _ready_.

No rumors this time. Invader Season had officially begun. If Red had to put up with everyone’s garbage for another decade, so be it. It’d be over soon. Everything before now was a shell. A relic. Outdated, obsolete, and already forgotten. All that lay before him now was the future.

Red frowned at his tethered ankle and the spoiled big-mouth attached to it. _Now I just need to get there in one piece._

“Take a good look around, Elites.” Poki spread her arm over the sprawl of bright-eyed Irkens clustered below her. “If you’ve got a problem with the faces you see, you’d better sort them out before sunrise because you’ll be seeing them for the next cycle and a half. Assuming you do your jobs right.”

In other words, suck it up and adapt. Understandable, Red supposed. An Invader needed to think on their feet and adapt according to circumstance. All soldiers did, but on the ground in enemy territory, adaptation would be crucial. Still, there had to be better ways than stapling each other into random squads.

“Subordinates, I expect you to follow commands and do your duty. Sub-commanders, I want ninety-percent _minimum_ of your squadmates present, alive, and whole at graduation. Anything lower is coming out of your score. Do not—I repeat, do NOT—abduct rival smallers to replace your own casualties. I _will_ know the difference, _Pleeps_. Don’t think Devastis forgot that little incident on Plookesia.”

Sub-commander Pleeps crossed her arms and grumbled to herself. Something about acid rain patterns, dynamite, and nothing being her fault. Some people just couldn’t own up to their mistakes.

Red eyed his own collection of smallers (and bonus Purple). The potato known as Skoodge waved his stubby arm from way in back. “Don’t know why we need squads in the first place. Invasion’s a solo job.” Or so he hoped. “I looked at the syllabus—”

“We have a syllabus?” Purple glanced at his own gauntlet.

“—and a bunch of it’s isolated fieldwork and solitary desensitization and stuff. Wouldn’t it make more sense if we all worked alone?”

In the high shadows of the walkway, Prime Commander Poki’s eyes glistened like the crosshairs of a sniper rifle. “Interesting assessment, Elite Red. With the squads moving in close quarters, it must feel like you’re never more than…” She gave a casual shrug. “…oh, _five_ feet apart, for example.”

_Note to self: stop thinking out loud._ “A _purely_ rhetorical question, ma’am. It’s a known fact that squad work strengthens species cohesion, reinforces the Collective Memory, and overall optimizes the proficiency of the great Irken Empire, ma’am.”

Poki raised her eyebrows. She almost seemed impressed. “You started the manual readings.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Not like he had much choice. It was either read the Invader trainee manual while waiting in line or listen to Purple talk about himself for a half hour. Only the introduction had been unlocked, but three read-throughs had been enough to memorize.

“The rest of you, read through the cutoff point before the start of training tomorrow. More instructions will appear as they apply. Go find your residential hubs and get out of my face.” Poki saluted them. “You’re dismissed. Irk lives.”

“Irk thrives,” the Elites called back.

It turned out that snacktime hadn’t been cancelled after all, though Poki wasted no time reminding them that they didn’t deserve it. Tradition was tradition, however, and Miyuki’s word topped hers.

The warlord’s ransom of snacks welcoming their squad to the residential hub had been the stuff of infantry rumors and drones’ wildest dreams. The makings of future foodie recordings and the Announcer’s Top 20. (It wouldn’t break the top ten, but it’d crack the mid-teens, no question.) Irk’s future Invaders had been granted every variety of every snack in every flavor, and Red’s rank and height gave him first pick.

It had been the most plentiful snacktime Red could remember since he graduated the Academy and the most variety he’d seen since… ever. They’d cracked open silos that’d been closed for centuries, brought nacho cheese aged to perfection, real vintage stuff. A snacking for the ages, they called it.

The first night of Invader training should have been a top-shelf memory, right up there with first flight, first kill, surface emergence, and that one time he did a backflip off _The_ _Lenient_ ’s roof. It should have been a symbol of greater things to come, blah blah literal feast represents the coming feast of conquest, Irk rules forever, and so on. And if he’d come a few days ago, it would have been. But he hadn’t.

As he juggled his eighteen cartons of vintage nachos, thirteen candy bars, thirty slooshies, five sandwiches, and an Emperor Supweme Fwozen Fweeze Sundae™, Red saw only limitations. _10 Samples Per Inch._ Restrictions. _All You Can Carry._ Barriers. _2 Gallons Per Foot._

It had been loads more than Red had ever seen on Sump. And also a fraction of the haul he’d seen in Purple’s pampered little hidey-hole, and none of the debris there could’ve been over a month old. The quality of the snacks themselves didn’t compare, but still. That snackage had been _limitless_. No caps. No quotas.

But back in Irken territory, rules were rules. There was nothing he could do about it, and he did his best not to brood over it. Red gnawed his jellybean sandwich, perched upon one of the rails bordering the pier that overlooked the bay. Every now and then, he glanced down to be sure the spoils of his snacktime were still safely cached below him.

Red absently scratched at the rim of his shackle, barely noticeable under the layered uniform. The training bay’s black horizon lay flat in the distance, save for when the odd submarine breached the surface or someone skipped mines across the water. With the little flat discs of the moons glinting and the acidic tang of smoke and fuel in the air, it almost felt like being on leave. One of those rare moments away from fleets and foreign crowds with room to breathe in the company of himself.

Almost.

A few feet below, curled in the grey sands under the pier, Elite Purple’s jaws smacked wetly while he gorged himself on his twenty-seventh parfait. A curious set of antennae swiveled along the edge of the pier, wiggling in the direction of Red’s snack horde. “Hey, are you gonna eat—”

“Yes.”

“You’re not eating it, though. What’s the matter with it, does it need to get ripe?”

The antennae wandered closer, trying to get a smell. Red grabbed the tip of one and squeezed.

“Owwww-ow-ow, okay, quit it!” A glove grabbed the edge of the pier. “Come on, I just wanna see.”

“You can see fine from down there, and nothing's wrong with any of it. You were there when I got everything, remember?” Memory of a gasquiggasplorch, that one. Red shifted to look over the rail, where Purple stood on tiptoe, his unbent antenna still twitching at the snack stash. “Just because you blew through your rations doesn’t mean you get any of mine.” He nudged Purple’s hand with his foot. “Shoo.”

Purple gave a funky little squint at “rations”, but shrugged it off. Metal squeaked under his gauntlets as he hauled himself up over the edge of the pier, but he stopped halfway. He rested his chin on his hands while the rest of him dangled like a fresh slab in a butcher shop.

Red moved to guard the snacks when he realized Purple’s eyes were somewhere else. He followed his gaze to the swarming crowds in the distance. A rhythmic chanting echoed from one of the balconies—cheering on a fight or someone about to attempt some crazy stunt. Or both. Off duty, it was no real concern to either of them.

“Kinda weird, isn’t it?” Purple said. “Being back with the crowds and squads and everybody. And when did everyone else get so short? It’s like they all shrank the last decade.”

“They didn’t get short. They _stayed_ short.” Red took a hard chomp of his jellybean sandwich. “Didn’t bother putting in the effort. But yeah, I haven’t been around this many guys at the same time since Academy. At least in the fleet you’re in your own ship half the time.”

Weird to think how Sump used to feel crowded, what with its packs of two dozen soldiers—a pittance compared to the three hundred in any given Devastis hub. No wonder they gave ranked Irkens their own quarters here; no way to get a minute of peace otherwise.

Not that Red got any alone time under his tethering anyway. “Can’t even sit alone in my own ship thanks to this thing.”

“Hey, so what actually happens when you get out of range, anyway? I’ve never really seen one of these.” The metal tips of Purple’s boots clanged against the bolsters as he swung his legs under the dock. He frowned at Red’s incredulous stare. “What? I haven’t. I never had to; most of my prisoners didn’t know they were prisoners. That or I boxed ‘em up instead.” His boots knocked out a little tune on the dock’s underside. “We gonna explode or get toxined to death or what?”

“Dunno.” It depended on if they wanted to make an impression on them or make an example to everyone else. “Both, maybe. Toxin and then evisceration—something messy and painful, whatever it is.”

“And public.”

Red nodded. They’d both felt the toxin’s warning stage, no doubting that part. If it had warnings for going out of range, it probably had failsafes for hacking, too. It’d paralyze both arms long before you could finish hacking the tethered leg off. “Wouldn’t surprise me if it was just toxin stuff, though.” 

“Yeah, some paralizey thing that hits at the worst moment so you just lie there and die from whatever’s trying to kill you already. Or die and explode and die again. I don’t get it; we didn’t even do that much. Come on, it’s our first day!” Purple hooked his arms around the rail and slithered up to sit beside Red on one of the lower rungs. With his head and arms poking out of the middle, he looked like he’d been sentenced to the stockades. “Was that Poki character always so nasty or does she hate your face in particular?”

A bitter smile twitched at the edge of Red’s mouth. “Tch, Commander Poki hates everyone’s face.”

Purple clutched both hands against his chest. “But everyone loves my face!” The tips of his antennae drooped a bit. “I moisturize and everything.”

The guy looked so pathetic, Red had to laugh. “Hey, look on the bright side: that face is still in one piece. Be happy I could talk her down to a lighter punishment.”

Slowly, Purple’s head rotated upwards. He stared like someone waiting for the rest of a punchline. Was he screwing around or did he seriously not get it?

“If I know Poki—and I do—she wanted to drag us through an atomizer and back. We’d be looking at the business end of a turbine right now, or stomping around the Digestor’s lower intestines or worse.” What exactly could be worse, Red didn’t know, but Poki’d always been the creative type. “And that insubordinate attitude of yours didn’t help, by the way.”

Purple kept staring like Red had sprouted a field of mushrooms across his face. “Red,” he slowly said, “that _was_ her throwing us into the atomizer. This is one of the worst punishments she could throw at us.”

“I… how? We got a distance restriction.” One with a really vicious penalty, but still just a distance restriction. “It’s inconvenient and annoying and… embarrassing…” Did it count as embarrassing when nobody could see the tether ring in the first place? Red frowned. “If she really wanted to humiliate us she would’ve done it in public.”

“Would’ve.” Purple rubbed the underside of his chin, examining a bruise left from a Screwhead wrench. “Except for the part where Poki’s six foot seven.”

Two inches shorter than them. Higher rank, but not higher stature. Whatevs and Nord weren’t much taller than her, either. They had to be around the same height; tall but not taller than Red and Purple. Not tall enough to be significant, anyway. 

Of course the Prime Commanders hadn’t chewed them out in public. They couldn’t. The smallers couldn’t witness someone punishing Irkens two inches taller than her; it went against the natural order. It just wasn’t done.

“That’s why they met us from that creepy glowing platform. So it’s not obvious.” And come to think of it, Red couldn’t remember being face to face with Poki since he’d come back from the Conventia mission when he’d had that last growth spurt. Everything interaction had been through remote contact or a mass address from a high podium or screamed from across the room. Never where anyone could notice the height difference, not even Red. Not once.

Everyone above you was literally above you. All his life, Red’s superiors had been taller than him, so he’d just presumed… But if he had two inches on Poki, that didn’t really make her his superior. Just his superior officer.

Red sat up and cracked open a fresh soda. “That’s why you were such a snotrag before. You knew she’d already played her best card. She couldn’t do anything else to us.”

“ _She_ can’t.” Purple curled his lip in a lazy snarl. “Your seven-foot buddy with the Ripper sure can.”

Red knocked back his soda, eying the residential annex that framed the eastern border. Needle points of the commanders’ lofts stabbed at the sky’s underbelly; the lights were already on in one of them. _He can try._

“Dunno why you had to bite that Sponch guy’s heels like that. You know what he’s gonna do to us the second he figures out we’re tethered, right?” Purple stuffed his last parfait in his mouth and swallowed it in two bites. The half a dozen crullers he’d been storing in his PAK followed it. “He’ll staple one to the floor and strap the other to a rocket to see which one explodes into chunks first. Or hold onto you while Pleeps grabs me and they slowly walk in separate directions to see how far they get before we start foaming at the mouth. Or get one of those clamps and—”

“I get it, Purple, thanks.”

“He could’ve—”

“He didn’t. And if what you’re saying is true, it’s a good thing I poked him now instead of later. Especially because all the squads probably won’t be together again until midterms.” Spurring on Sponch that much had been a half-accident, but not the point. “He knows we won’t roll over for him now. We didn’t need to win, we just had to live. It looks good.”

“To who? Maybe it impressed some of the smallers, but—”

Red’s empty soda can bounced off Purple’s head and into the water. “Irk to Purple: the smallers are _almost everyone_. You know who spurs a taller and lives to laugh about it? Nobody.”

Purple licked soda droplets off of his face and didn’t seem overly impressed. “He’s only got a couple of inches on us, though. It’s not gonna make us look that much better.”

“No,” Red told him. “but it does make Sponch look worse.” And now he’d have to work to get that respect back. He’d waste time. Time enough for Red to get a head start on those kill counts and high scores. “If we can’t outgrow him, the next best thing’s out-reputationing him.”

Purple rolled his eyes. “‘Reputationing’ isn’t a word.”

“I— You know what I mean! Shut up, you’re dumb.”

“YOU’RE dumb!”

“No, _you’re_ dumb because _I_ said _you_ were dumb first. You don’t get to turn it around on me like that.”

Got him there; nobody could counter that logic. All Purple could do was sputter at him like a busted engine. “O-oh yeah? Yeah?!” He grabbed the railing, pushing himself higher with the shrill pitch of his voice. “Well if I’m so dumb, how come I had to be the one to explain how your own commander’s shorter than—” He stopped, antennae high and eyes bright.

Red leaned back on the railing as Purple swept in closer.

The Elite crouched with one hand on the rail and the other clutching his chips like he’d found the last bag on Devastis. Quickly, he glanced at Red, his snack stash, then back to Red again. “ _That’s_ why you’re hoarding like they’re not gonna feed us anymore, and sulking all over the place, and you know about shorty stuff. You’re a spurt.”

Red’s claws scraped paint off the rail. “It’s like I said: some guys just don’t want to do the work. I earned all of my inches.” He braced his shoulders and sized up Purple in a quick scan. “Don’t know if I can say the same for every taller in this army.”

That should have thrown the gauntlet. This was supposed to be the part where Purple tackled him or tried to kick Red off the pier or flew into a battle of insults. At the very least they should have exchanged bitter glares.

Instead, Purple laughed. Not one of those fakes to break tension or soften a threat. A real and honest laugh. Weirdo. “Yeah! Some of us are born naturally tall and cool and handsome and talented and handsome and tall. Guess I’ll have to live with it.” Eventually, he realized he was still the only one laughing. Purple sighed. “Okay, you really need to cut that out.”

“Cut what out?” Red pulled his legs in and glared at him. “I’m not doing anything.”

“That! That right— _this_! All of this!” Purple summed up Red’s whole body in a flailing blur of pointy hands. “Red, you’re one of the tallest guys in Invader training—INVADER training—and you’re shluffing around like some janitor drone or whatever. Irk’s sake, you’re almost seven feet tall. If you want to be a sulky chip bag until graduation, fine, but _I’m_ the one stuck to you all year.”

“Well excuse me if I’m not thrilled about being tethered to a lazy, incompetent…” Red blinked. “Did you just call me a chip bag?”

The bag of Xtra Crispies squished in Purple’s grip. He ripped it open and tipped it in Red’s face. “See this? This is you.”

Red waved away the blue clouds of chip dust and peered inside. He raised an eyebrow. “…salty?”

“No—well… yeah. But not what I meant. Look, it’s half air with all the chips at the bottom so they don’t get all crunched up. Big on the outside, little on the inside.” Even littler on the inside with the way Purple was going to town on those chips. He’d already devoured half of his metaphor. “I don’t want to run under a leader still snapping at everyone’s kneecaps. It’s embarrassing.”

Big talk for someone who did a great job embarrassing himself already. But something else in that rant stuck out, so small that Red wondered if it’d fallen in by accident.

“Did you say ‘leader’?”

Purple licked up the crumbs at the bottom of his bag and nodded.

“Neither of us was assigned leadership, though.” As Red recalled, they were technically both sub-commander. Co-commanders, he’d heard Tenn call it. Under normal circumstances, the one with the most inches got the role, but since they were the same height down to the millimeter…

“I figured you wanted it more than me.” Purple shrugged.

“Yeah, but… don’t you want to fight for it?”

Red’s shoulders sagged. He’d kind of been looking forward to the inevitable glorious battle for the right to lead Squadron 732. And also for the opportunity to stomp the heel of his boot through Purple’s eye socket. He’d prepped a one-liner and everything: _“Bet you didn’t_ ** _see_** _that coming!”_ he’d say and then Red would laugh and the squad would laugh and the arena would laugh and Purple would cry with the eye that still worked.

“I mean. I guess we _could_ , but…” Purple’s sentence trailed off, too indifferent to finish.

“But what?” It was a trick. It had to be a trick. Nobody could give up the opportunity to lead a whole squad without at least complaining about it.

“I already know what happens. We fight, somebody wins. Loser stays mad about it until there’s another fight and in-between there’s sabotage and backtalk and poisoned donuts and I’m barfing all over the floor and… can we just skip it? It wasn’t any fun on Foodcourtia, and it’s not gonna be any fun here. If you want more work telling shorties what to do, you can have it.” Purple pointed his foot toward the battered Arena Spire. “We’ve already got two other squad commanders to worry about.”

“Eight squad commanders.” Red pointed to the nine lofts overlooking Residential. The lights had gone on in two more of them. Must’ve been nice, having the whole place to themselves. “Whatevs and Nord have three sets, too.”

Purple threw his head back and groaned.

Honestly, Red could see the practical side of Purple’s stance. Since they were stuck together no matter what, it made sense to get leadership squared away as soon as possible. Otherwise, they’d be fighting each other, the other sub-commanders, AND wrangling their squad on top of everything else. A split command weakened the entire squad. Weakened squads meant lower scores, and Red didn’t plan on leaving Devastis with anything less than an S++.

But all that crazy talk about “just skipping” their inevitable battle to the death could only be a lie. Or a distraction. Or both. There was no denying the Elite had a talent for deception. The infiltration trick with that Mauv persona proved that. No way Elite Purple actually believed it; nobody Red’s height could be that stupid.

This had been a postponement, not a cancellation. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, maybe not even this year, but eventually they’d come to a head. Purple had moved through the higher circles too long not to know that. Fine, then. If the Infiltrator wanted to play the long game, then game on.

Red sat up and stared Purple in the eye, red eyes alight with the burning resolve of at least three and a half stars. “I’m still going to crack your skull under my boot at the end of this. Just so you know.”

Purple waved his legs over the pier, sipping a milkshake. He smiled. “Neat.”


End file.
